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Vicarious Visions were initially behind Call of Duty for Vita

Sid

Member
It wasn't a sudden realization. Activision just didn't care.


The moral of this story as far as I can tell is what we already know. Sony is dumb and Activision are assholes.
If it was being worked on for 18 months something would have been shown by sony or leaked at least.
 
Stopped reading right here. Yeah, Criterion did a decent job of downporting, but "decent traffic populations" is not in the game. The populations is sparse and barely there. They had to do that due to draw distance/pop-in and to prevent people from slamming into traffic on the system.

It's definitely not 1:1 with the console versions. More like .5:1 so before you go shooting ATVI for not doing it, you have to remember that while Criterion tried it isn't a total console experience that Sony sells.

Just like if FPS on the system would drop grenades (tap/drag to throw, WHY.jpg) the gameplay would improve, so did Criterion nearly axing traffic and shit for performance reasons.

I'm always hitting cars at inopportune times, especially during races, or police chases. Not all areas are densely populated but there is generally enough traffic, for me to call it decent.
 
I would actually really, really love to hear activision's side of the story. Because I will fully admit that everything im saying here is coming straight from Sony so it's obviously biased in how they viewed the whole thing.


Does anyone know anyone over there?
 

_machine

Member
Agreed. Vicarious Visions (if it was in fact them. TBH my sony guys never told me who at activision were working on it before Nihilistic) is no Criterion. What Criterion pulled off with NFSvita is pretty damn amazing.
You also have to factor in that Criterion had their own engine for the game whilst VV had to try to get someone else's engine to work on the Vita. It's much easier to customise your own code than to work around someone else's.
 

Gadirok

Member
well this is SCEA/Jack Tretton fault I guess.

no wonder why SCEA don't support Vita,they made a huge mistake early on putting all their Vita budget into one-third party- game.

If anything SCEJ didn't support the vita, and japan is where it desperately needed to grow first.

I don't see the 3DS exactly moving wonders in NA either, but thats because handhelds don't seem to be as popular here as much as smartphone gaming is.


Sony should have done what people were hyping up for 5 years ago by making a Playstation phone. Plenty of people would have bought into it. And I don't mean The Xerpia Play, I mean an actual Playstation Portable/vita with phone functions.

Offering a basic model as a standalone gaming system/multimedia system and the other as a phone.

This stupid 3G model or wifi was bound to fail when they never put the actual support in.


If anyone's devs team have been dedicating their time to the vita its SCEE, and I applaud their actions for it, but because of this half-***ed mess SCEE has already taken off Liverpool, bigbig, and someone else I think who were working on vita games.



SCEA has wasted valuable money and lost resources, now I want to see what their next move will be when their return on profit doesn't show.
 
I would actually really, really love to hear activision's side of the story. Because I will fully admit that everything im saying here is coming straight from Sony so it's obviously biased in how they viewed the whole thing.


Does anyone know anyone over there?

Ask your people to get Ghostbusters PSP on PSN, through the Vita store, in NA ^_^

And yes, this is a very intriguing story that I'm very curious to know more about. It's very compelling, like a bad break up where you want to know all of the juicy details - squee! :0)
 
If it was being worked on for 18 months something would have been shown by sony or leaked at least.

My understanding (and I'm not the most reliable source in the world, im just telling you what ive heard from 2 folks inside sony, neither of whom worked directly on this.... so it may even be corporate rumors) is that they were porting the engine and it just wasn't working. There was nothing to leak. It just didn't work.


It also wasn't part of the contract that Sony had any input about the game. They didn't have producers working on it or overseeing it. It was 100% activision's game to make however they wanted to. They didn't have to show it to sony, they didn't have to clear a price for it with sony, they didn't have to do anything except release a game in the middle of november. They approached Sony and said they couldn't get it done and sony hooked them up with nihilistic. And then they made the game. As far as activision is concerned they fulfilled their end of the bargain, because technically they did.
 

cyborg009

Banned
My understanding (and I'm not the most reliable source in the world, im just telling you what ive heard from 2 folks inside sony, neither of whom worked directly on this.... so it may even be corporate rumors) is that they were porting the engine and it just wasn't working. There was nothing to leak. It just didn't work.


It also wasn't part of the contract that Sony had any input about the game. They didn't have producers working on it or overseeing it. It was 100% activision's game to make however they wanted to. They didn't have to show it to sony, they didn't have to clear a price for it with sony, they didn't have to do anything except release a game in the middle of november. They approached Sony and said they couldn't get it done and sony hooked them up with nihilistic. And then they made the game. As far as activision is concerned they fulfilled their end of the bargain, because technically they did.

So pretty much next year were not getting Call of Duty Modern Warfare: Declassified
 

RedSwirl

Junior Member
This concerns me as much as anything if it's true. I know it isn't always desirable to get a port of a game as opposed to an original title but in certain cases I think it's the smarter move, and Black Ops 2 seems like one of those cases. One of Sony's huge selling points for the Vita prior to its release was how easy it was to develop for and how simple it should be to get PS3 games running on it. What is keeping this from being a reality, I wonder? It's troubling.

The fact that it's not the exact same OS and development platform. I don't think you're ever gonna truly have widely-supported cross-play compatibility until you've got two or more platforms that are essentially the same thing in different hardware shells. That's how you get universal iOS games. It's really more akin to the relationship between the Game Gear and the Sega Master System.
 

CamHostage

Member
Jesus, it must have been an absolute fucking wreck for Activision to cancel it, and get the jobbers at Nihilistic to pick up the slack.
Either that, or it was just cheaper to give it to Nihilstic.

I'm going to guess the latter, Vicarious Visions is a competent studio (though they seem to be at their best when challenged by lesser-tech hardware, going by their GBA and DS work,) but the timing probably stopped working for Activision and the ease of reskinning/retrofitting the Resistance engine seemed a better deal while assigning the internal Vicarious to projects that the company actually cared about.

Too bad, it would have been nice symmetry too since Vicarious Vision was there with a PSP launch game too in the Spiderman 2 game.

What i've heard from folks (two, to be exact) inside sony is similar but it's more like...


*Activision tried to scale down the COD engine to fit on the vita, something that Sony said wasn't a good idea but activision did anyway. From what I hear they worked on it for 18 months(!).

*It didn't work.

*Sony sent over Nihilistic to start from scratch using the engine they just created for resistance.

*They created the entire game from the middle of May to the middle of October.

*The reason it *had* to come out this year was because the contract the two (sony and activision) signed stipulated that it would come out at this time and sony paid 12 million in marketing as part of this contract. Basically, it sounds like its a clusterfuck to change a release date when there is a contract between two huge entities like this.

*Ive also heard from multiple people that it was 100% activision's call to charge $50.

All things considered the game is actually pretty fun for something in development for 5 months. It's certainly not $50 worth of fun though.

And if I'm sony I'm not particularly happy with activision right now.

Timeline makes sense. And I agree, it's a much lesser COD than it should be for a system like Vita but it has its qualities, the real sin of the game isn't that it sucks or is a lesser COD but that it's brazenly pushed for $50 when it's not worth that. Priced appropriately and it would have been a nice quick fix that'd compliment the home game; instead, they insult the fanbase and the Vita supporters by overpricing it and hiding all the cut corners until the very last second. (Activision might be laughing all the way to the bank, though, the game seems to have fallen off but it was the top-selling Vita game for a while; thankfully the more ambitious AC Liberation has taken its place on Amazon, GameStop shows them still pretty close.)
 

Totobeni

An blind dancing ho
Nope just Bioshock:Declassified Skies.

now that you mentioned it..

If Sony also gave 2K a $10+ or so millions for a Bioshock Vita project,then they better just let Bend Studio work on it right now because Irrational Games/2K Games will never do it and Vita might end with re-skinned Bioshock challenge Rooms developed by 2K Marin.
 
So pretty much next year were not getting Call of Duty Modern Warfare: Declassified

There aren't even rumors at this point of another game coming. Though, to be fair, we know very little about next fall on any console.


I think people are waiting to see how the dust settles after this holiday. If the Vita performed modestly strong and Cod and AC both were profitable, we might see more of the same next fall. If not I (and this is just me, not from sony sources) see the vita being mostly first party, the odd japanese title and a whole bunch of indie stuff for the foreseeable future.
 

Sid

Member
now that you mentioned it..

If Sony also gave 2K a $10+ or so millions for a Bioshock Vita project,then they better just let Bend Studio work on it right now because Irrational Games/2K Games will never do it and Vita might end with re-skinned Bioshock challenge Rooms developed by 2K Marin.
Sony doesn't exactly have much cash for stuff like this,they have got their next gen console launch coming up and have to run so many different first party studios.
 
The fact that it's not the exact same OS and development platform. I don't think you're ever gonna truly have widely-supported cross-play compatibility until you've got two or more platforms that are essentially the same thing in different hardware shells. That's how you get universal iOS games. It's really more akin to the relationship between the Game Gear and the Sega Master System.
I'm no expert on game development so I'm just speculating but it just seems strange to me that CoD can be ported to so many different platforms successfully (PS3, 360, Wii, WiiU, PC) but for some reason it can't be done on the Vita. It seems especially weird since it goes against what Sony kept saying about the system prior to launch.
 

Spiegel

Member
What i've heard from folks (two, to be exact) inside sony is similar but it's more like...


*Activision tried to scale down the COD engine to fit on the vita, something that Sony said wasn't a good idea but activision did anyway. From what I hear they worked on it for 18 months(!).

*It didn't work.

*Sony sent over Nihilistic to start from scratch using the engine they just created for resistance.

*They created the entire game from the middle of May to the middle of October.

*The reason it *had* to come out this year was because the contract the two (sony and activision) signed stipulated that it would come out at this time and sony paid 12 million in marketing as part of this contract. Basically, it sounds like its a clusterfuck to change a release date when there is a contract between two huge entities like this.

*Ive also heard from multiple people that it was 100% activision's call to charge $50.



All things considered the game is actually pretty fun for something in development for 5 months. It's certainly not $50 worth of fun though.



And if I'm sony I'm not particularly happy with activision right now.



A 4-guy team could get COD running on the Wii all these years but Vicarious Visions could not do it on Vita after 18 months of development?

Yeah, I will take this insider information with a grain of salt
 
Sony should have done what people were hyping up for 5 years ago by making a Playstation phone. Plenty of people would have bought into it. And I don't mean The Xerpia Play, I mean an actual Playstation Portable/vita with phone functions.

Offering a basic model as a standalone gaming system/multimedia system and the other as a phone.

I am having difficulty understanding this. Why not the Xperia Play? It is much more powerful than the PSP, it has buttons, and it is a phone. What more are you looking for exactly?



I am surprised act let the ball drop so hard. It seems like a bad situation all around but the time restrictions are most likely what doomed it. Or the initial devs.

A 4-guy team could get COD running on the Wii all these years but Vicarious Visions could not do it on Vita after 18 months of development?

Yeah, I will take this insider information with a grain of salt

Even competent devs can drop the ball at times. I am still trying to figure out what happened with FR and "Haze".
 
It could not have been worse than Declassified. That game was such an absolute trainwreck that Nihilistic changed their name to distance themselves from it.

Sidenote, I will give Nihilistic credit for creating maybe two of the most disappointing games on the Vita in less than a year. They sure can produce turds quickly and efficiently!
 

WinFonda

Member
$12 million? What the fuck. How much would it have cost to get Monster Hunter? Did Sony not realize that just a name on the box doesn't push games?

If the famousmortimer's post is correct, then they believed the game would have a 2 year development period and that the game would be handled with care. lol.
 

Kazerei

Banned
sony-tokyo-event-1579.jpg


Such a great moment.

It's sad and funny to reflect back on the NGP/Vita reveal hype. To be fair, it sounded like there was alot of developer support, but those were just words and not real commitments.

Also this thread is great in hindsight.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=431550
 
I'd really have prefered Sony waited a couple of months to release Declassified.

Q1 looks very empty in the West, and this title could've been the key piece in the blank spot that's coming.
 
I agree, it seems insane. The deal with ubi for AC3L was likely similar (though I haven't heard that directly). What Ive been told is that Sony's big plan for this holiday was having these "huge" franchises as pack in games. Whether or not that pans out in hardware sales remains to be seen. But I think we know how it's gonna turn out.


It was a bold move, it just wasn't a smart one. COD doesn't equal money. COD is on everything from the DS to my freakin phone. The only place it's absurdly popular is on consoles. I don't know why Sony thought it was such a coup to get it on its handheld.

If what you're saying is true, Sony paid $24 million for two subpar games developed by a B developer and a crappy developer. For that money they could have gotten GTA SAS, MH, DQ, or FF. All games that have proven to be able to sell on handhelds. Or they could have made Acti and Ubi guarantee that IW/Treyarch/AC studio are the ones working on it or they have to repay the money. Or they could have used that money to buy a small developer or two, possibly in Japan, and set up their own studios to continue with their MH clone (SS), develop a DQ clone, and reboot LoD and other RPGs, genres that sell on handhelds, especially in Japan.
 

twinturbo2

butthurt Heat fan
I hope Activision makes another COD game for the Vita and actually puts some fucking quality into it. I was interested in Declassified, but the first impressions scared me off.
 
What are the odds of a CoD vita next year?

Doubt Sony was too happy about declassified.

Probably not much. Activision is going to have their hands full enough getting a Durango version out there let alone to be worried about handhelds. Activision doesn't give a shit. They probably made a very lucrative amount of cash off the deal and they get to walk away with no damage done to the brand.
 

Mpl90

Two copies sold? That's not a bomb guys, stop trolling!!!
Probably not much. Activision is going to have their hands full enough getting a Durango version out there let alone to be worried about handhelds. Activision doesn't give a shit. They probably made a very lucrative amount of cash off the deal and they get to walk away with no damage done to the brand.

Didn't they just create a specific COD team for portable releases ( mobile and handheld)?
 
I agree, it seems insane. The deal with ubi for AC3L was likely similar (though I haven't heard that directly). What Ive been told is that Sony's big plan for this holiday was having these "huge" franchises as pack in games. Whether or not that pans out in hardware sales remains to be seen. But I think we know how it's gonna turn out.


It was a bold move, it just wasn't a smart one. COD doesn't equal money. COD is on everything from the DS to my freakin phone. The only place it's absurdly popular is on consoles. I don't know why Sony thought it was such a coup to get it on its handheld.

Well, Sony's entire strategy for Vita outside Japan has been hinged on the notion of a large, untapped audience of teen/adult males who want to play console-style 3D games on the go. If you believe (or need to believe) that that audience exists, securing an exclusive* installment in the most popular such console franchise would seem like a sensible idea, at least on paper.

*Which admittedly doesn't fit with the part about a BOII port, but maybe that's erroneous? Dunno.
 

injurai

Banned
Publishers that don't know how to run a business are fucking over the 1st parties... yeah I can see how we got into this mess now...
 

Agent X

Member
Activision should release a Tony Hawk game for Vita, perhaps as a downloadable game. I remember Tony Hawk's Underground 2 Remix for PSP being an excellent conversion, and that was a North American launch title for the system.

Agreed. Vicarious Visions (if it was in fact them. TBH my sony guys never told me who at activision were working on it before Nihilistic) is no Criterion. What Criterion pulled off with NFSvita is pretty damn amazing.

Oh man, I've got NFS:MW for Vita sitting here for the last two days, still sealed. I think I'll go give it a try now.
 

therapist

Member
Would of been easier to port cod2 or 4 ,and would of been 10x better.

Declassified is garbage , i already traded it in.

Luckily i only paid 30$ for it , not 50 , and got basically 35$ trade in for it.
 
Activision should release a Tony Hawk game for Vita, perhaps as a downloadable game. I remember Tony Hawk's Underground 2 Remix for PSP being an excellent conversion, and that was a North American launch title for the system.



Oh man, I've got NFS:MW for Vita sitting here for the last two days, still sealed. I think I'll go give it a try now.

It's amazing. Play it.
 

DiscoJer

Member
Stopped reading right here. Yeah, Criterion did a decent job of downporting, but "decent traffic populations" is not in the game. The populations is sparse and barely there. They had to do that due to draw distance/pop-in and to prevent people from slamming into traffic on the system.

It's definitely not 1:1 with the console versions. More like .5:1 so before you go shooting ATVI for not doing it, you have to remember that while Criterion tried it isn't a total console experience that Sony sells.

Just like if FPS on the system would drop grenades (tap/drag to throw, WHY.jpg) the gameplay would improve, so did Criterion nearly axing traffic and shit for performance reasons.

This is why the Vita is screwed. Rather than people seeing how flat out amazing the game is on the Vita, all people do is point out how it's not a perfect port of the PS3 version.

Though I gotta say, if it had 2x the traffic, it would be unplayable.
 
What are the odds of a CoD vita next year?

Doubt Sony was too happy about declassified.

Even though everyone is calling activision assholes right now, they probably will do a better cod game on vita next time, not just as a good jester, but also just because they'd want a good metacritic score on the next cod handheld game to make up for this one's faults.
 

Chittagong

Gold Member
This has always facinated me: how do you replicate the feel of a game when building an all new engine, so that the distinct gameplay feels exactly the same, especially for something as well known as CoD? What kinds of variables would be most crucial in nailing the feel?
 

rouken

Member
This is why the Vita is screwed. Rather than people seeing how flat out amazing the game is on the Vita, all people do is point out how it's not a perfect port of the PS3 version.

Though I gotta say, if it had 2x the traffic, it would be unplayable.

well its touted as a multiplatform game so people expect it to be the same game as the 360 and ps3 version. and if this is the future of vita, we could see it being included in digital foundry analysis of multiplatform games and vita will lose every one of it.
 

RedSwirl

Junior Member
CoD engine runs like a hot mess on more powerful platforms like PS3. Not entirely surprising it was doing worse on a weaker platform.

Actually, compared to most PS3 ports the Call of Duty games perform spectacularly close to their 360 originals. Well, at least the IW ones anyway. As far back as COD4 that developer has been hailed for the quality of their PS3 ports.

As for the reason why they abandoned a straight Vita port of BLOPSII, only reason I can think up, as mentioned earlier in this thread, was the weak Vita launch.
 

Skyzard

Banned
This is why the Vita is screwed. Rather than people seeing how flat out amazing the game is on the Vita, all people do is point out how it's not a perfect port of the PS3 version.

Though I gotta say, if it had 2x the traffic, it would be unplayable.

Very much agree. NFS is probably the best handheld racer ever made - I even prefer the Vita version to playing the PC version - the physics are too arcade and fun for me to get all serious to play on the TV.
Pick-up and play open world with awesome cars? The lower traffic count 'issue' was blown way out of proportion as the only footage we had for a long time was a 23second clip in a remote area where only one car was seen.

The game is excellent and is probably very near to wipeout for my playtime. Paid £40 and have no regrets.

Only complaint is that the police are too easy on Vita (too hard on other systems though).

Many games suit the vita better than their console counterparts for me and the visual compromise is a non-issue for most games, given the advantages of having it completely in your hands (and with standby).
 

Takao

Banned
I know VV aren't as bad as Nihilistic, but they're still not grand. Don't know why anybody cares.

It's not so much love for VV, but rather understanding how Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified came to be.

Even though everyone is calling activision assholes right now, they probably will do a better cod game on vita next time, not just as a good jester, but also just because they'd want a good metacritic score on the next cod handheld game to make up for this one's faults.

I really doubt there will ever be another Call of Duty on Vita, and if there is it'll be a port of a 3DS/iOS game.
 
If what you're saying is true, Sony paid $24 million for two subpar games developed by a B developer and a crappy developer. For that money they could have gotten GTA SAS, MH, DQ, or FF. All games that have proven to be able to sell on handhelds. Or they could have made Acti and Ubi guarantee that IW/Treyarch/AC studio are the ones working on it or they have to repay the money. Or they could have used that money to buy a small developer or two, possibly in Japan, and set up their own studios to continue with their MH clone (SS), develop a DQ clone, and reboot LoD and other RPGs, genres that sell on handhelds, especially in Japan.



I think you think 24 million dollars is a lot more money than it actually is. 24 million dollars couldn't get IW to write a design document let alone make a game. And it's just an assumption that Ubi got the same deal, no one has explicitly said that. In fact I haven't seen any sony-made adverts for it so there may have been no deal at all other than for the pack in. Who knows.



A 4-guy team could get COD running on the Wii all these years but Vicarious Visions could not do it on Vita after 18 months of development?

Yeah, I will take this insider information with a grain of salt

I agree that my info should be taken with a grain of salt. The stuff in Tak's OP, however, should be taken as what happened. And that's what happened. VV worked on it, it wasn't good enough, Nihilistic came in after resistance shipped and made declassified which evidently is better than what VV made. That's fact.
 
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