[STHX]

Falk, on 22 May 2015 - 08:19 AM, said:

STHX, on 22 May 2015 - 07:11 AM, said:

But I agree with Falk:

Wha?!

I'm very sorry, dyslexy attack, I meant Felik.

[Kiddo Cabbusses]

TimmiT, on 22 May 2015 - 04:01 AM, said:

Going by when SEGA made the Nintendo exclusivity deal, they spent 1.5 years of development getting the game to work on the platform. That's 1.5 years they could have spent improving the game.

1) Going by the delay of Rayman Legends specifically so it'd get other console ports, I'd imagine the average portjob is 8-10 months.
2) WHOLE GAMES are developed in 1.5 years. If the portjob itself was that fucking time-consuming logically they'd have restarted coding from scratch.
3) The final results sure as heck do not look like the kind of portjob that they took extra time in polishing out the bugs with.

STHX said:

Yet, in January 2014 (at least seven months after the exclusivity was announced) they released a trailer with "in-engine" footage which obviously doesn't look anywhere like the final game. I still remain by my original idea that Boom was not supposed to release in 2014 but in 2015 (not necessarily in November). It would make sense to release it after the cartoon aired at least once. And this would mean the decision to make it a 2014 Wii U game must have come during the chirstmas 2013 period, giving BRB less than 6/8 months to port and finish the game. I feel that there isn't just one reason on why the game ended up like this. The exclusivity deal, SoA and SoJ mismanagement, a new unproven team, time constraints, lack of a real direction, all these things killed Boom in the end..

As such I would more likely imagine this scenario, where BRB was told sometime between around Jan 2015 that they had to port the engine to Wii U. They probably quickly cobbled the code for the E3 demos (Since a lot of the slowdown is actually caused by the game being large - the demos are actually quicker) and then spent some time afterward trying to optimize it for stability.

That would give them a more expected porting job timeframe.

Unfortunately, it still wouldn't explain what the hell was wrong with the level design, story, voice acting, and basic mechanics, which under this scenario should have more time to be ironed out than the unrealistic-sounding "They spent a year and a half simply getitng it to work on Wii U!"

(BTW guys, remember that Crytek got their engine running on Wii U about 4 or so months after it's launch period. Probably not much better than BigRedButton since no finished game came out of it, but it shows that it should not have taken 1.5 years to get functioning.)

[TimmiT]

Kiddo Cabbusses, on 22 May 2015 - 08:37 AM, said:

TimmiT, on 22 May 2015 - 04:01 AM, said:

Going by when SEGA made the Nintendo exclusivity deal, they spent 1.5 years of development getting the game to work on the platform. That's 1.5 years they could have spent improving the game.

1) Going by the delay of Rayman Legends specifically so it'd get other console ports, I'd imagine the average portjob is 8-10 months.
2) WHOLE GAMES are developed in 1.5 years. If the portjob itself was that fucking time-consuming logically they'd have restarted coding from scratch.
3) The final results sure as heck do not look like the kind of portjob that they took extra time in polishing out the bugs with.

You're comparing porting a Cryengine 3 game to inferior hardware to porting an Ubiart game to superior hardware. The former takes far more effort to make stuff with than the latter, which isn't graphically intensive at all. And keep in mind that they were porting it from a PC targeting PS4/Xbox One graphics to the Wii U, which is a console that doesn't natively support the engine is a massive downgrade. So they had to figure out themselves how to get it working. Big Red Button also has far, far less employees than Ubisoft, which had two of their studios working on Rayman Legends.

If Naughty Dog had trouble porting The Last of Us from PS3 to PS4 within a year, then I can easily see why Big Red Button had trouble porting a game from a middle/high-end PC to Wii U in a year and a half. They also had staff leaving the studio while the game was being ported, including the original producer who left in September 2013.

This post has been edited by TimmiT: 22 May 2015 - 11:07 AM

[Kiddo Cabbusses]

TimmiT, on 22 May 2015 - 10:55 AM, said:

You're comparing porting a Cryengine 3 game to inferior hardware to porting an Ubiart game to superior hardware. The former takes far more effort to make stuff with than the latter, which isn't graphically intensive at all. And keep in mind that they were porting it from a PC targeting PS4/Xbox One graphics to the Wii U, which is a console that doesn't natively support the engine is a massive downgrade. So they had to figure out themselves how to get it working. Big Red Button also has far, far less employees than Ubisoft, which had two of their studios working on Rayman Legends.

Okay then, does Xenoblade (Wii) to Xenoblade 3D (New 3DS) work as a better example, then? That was a game that was quickly ported to vastly inferior hardware and yet somehow managed to escape with only resolution issues inherent to the hardware it was working with. Similarly, Donkey Kong Country Returns from Wii to 3DS suffered mostly in framerate, but was otherwise really solid. Even the SaSASRT port to 3DS which had a framerate like ass played better than RoL. Or heck, let's go back a bit further to some game ports which turned out REALLY technically impressive considering they were being made for hardware that wasn't meant to support them, like Street Fighter Alpha 3 on GBA (Or Playstation, considering how impressive that was at the time) or Virtua Fighter 2 for Saturn or RE2 for N64 or... yeah, I can name off a lot of these, especially from the 32-bit era. Get what I mean? And even outside of ports, look at most of the Wii U games that can pull hardware Voodoo the likes of which you don't see often outside the old days of the 16-bit console wars. I'm not saying BigRedButton was expected to pull off a CryEngine 3 game on Wii U with 60FPS - far from it - but they definitely had PLENTY OF TIME to make a more polished, refined experience, engine port issues be damned. Again, we're not talking about merely a subpar game or a game with missed potential - we're talking about one of the most critically panned, IP-damaging games the Sonic IP has been tainted with, where bugged code and graphical downgrades were the LEAST among the complaints. Sega may have done a lot wrong here, but developers have managed to put out something better than "the worst game in years" under worse developer pressures before - many of the BEST video games made have similar stories of crazy internal drama.

Here's some of my big questions regarding the supposed difficulty of CryEngine 3:
1) Why was CryEngine 3 marketed as a selling point to begin with? It was like this from before the game was defined as a Sonic game. Was someone at BRB connected with Crytek? That's the best reason I could think of to stick it with through hell and back. If so, I would imagine someone at BRB had a connection to Crytek which if so should have helped with the Wii U port.
2) If they really had 1.5 years to port the game to Wii U code, and if CryEngine was that difficult to work with, then I would imagine at that time it had gone to the point where it was easier to re-code from the ground up. There was no real reason CryEngine was needed - nothing Sonic Boom did was outstanding by the standards of a PS2 3D platformer, not even the supposed "better" graphics of the reveal trailers. Thus I doubt they spent 1.5 years trying to do something that apparently is SO IMPOSSIBLE many consider it a lot more difficult than simply cobbling together something in Unreal Engine 3 or even from scratch. There was nothing significant or necessary about Cryengine 3.
3) At least some people have proposed that Sega forced them to stick with CryEngine 3, but why the hell would Sega do that with absolutely nothing to gain from it? They have no big deals or connection with Crytek, and they don't use CryEngine on any of their other works. The only real explanation would be if Sega paid a heavy sum to license CryEngine 3, which wouldn't make sense if they planned for Wii U exclusivity as far ahead as 1.5 years before launch. Sega would probably have been glad to switch to middleware better suited for Wii U.
4) Was CryEngine really suited for the kind of game BRB was working on to begin with? What kind of character-action-platformer required Crysis-level graphics in the past? Hyper-realism is not suited for wacky, cartoony antics the likes Sonic Boom was meant to have (but was mostly absent on.). Most 3D platformer fans are Fine with N64-grade polygons as long as it looks whimsical and approachable. It sounds to me like the concept in and of itself was badly thought out.

Also, while BRB may have had less employees than Ubisoft, it wasn't like Ubisoft threw 1000+ of their staff on Rayman Legends. Ubiart was a team more the size of a typical Nintendo game development team - the large numbers are for the AssCreed crowd.

As for the leaving employees, IIRC most of that happened in June 2014 and based on the testimonies it seems many of them weren't exactly informed of them being out of the company before it happened... poor Senn. :<

[TimmiT]

Kiddo Cabbusses, on 22 May 2015 - 02:36 PM, said:

Also, while BRB may have had less employees than Ubisoft, it wasn't like Ubisoft threw 1000+ of their staff on Rayman Legends. Ubiart was a team more the size of a typical Nintendo game development team - the large numbers are for the AssCreed crowd.

Surprisingly, Rayman Legends had a very large team. Not sure if it was Assassin's Creed size, but it's pretty abnormal for a 2D sidescroller. The ending credits go on for 16 minutes:


And again: it likely takes far, far less effort to port the Ubiart engine, which can run on far less powerful platforms than Cryengine 3 does.

As for why they chose Cryengine 3: obviously I don't know, but it was perfectly feasible for them to make a game with it for PS4/Xbox One. And according to the video they had too much work done to switch engines. It's not like they could've just switched to a different engine, which might have taken more work than getting Cryengine to work on Wii U. And just because other developers were able to make impressive ports, doesn't mean that Big Red Button should be able to do the same with completely different tools on a console with outdated hardware that they have no experience with. Especially when those games are ported by developers who are very familiar with the platform.

Also, it's possible that Big Red Button had to cut out features and parts of the game to get it working on Wii U. Of course I have no idea if those would have been better than what a PS2 3D platformer would be able to do, but that all depends on how it was built. At the very least it seems likely that the city hub area was originally less abandoned.

This post has been edited by TimmiT: 22 May 2015 - 03:42 PM

[Dark Sonic]

This is sounding a lot like the Sonic 06 arguments in the sense that there's a lot of "it had good ideas and it would have been good if not for X, Y, and Z circumstances" going around.

Even if this game looked nice, had less glitches, and was in a competent engine, given what we got, would it have been any good anyway? Or would it have gone from turd to polished turd.

[TimmiT]

Dark Sonic, on 22 May 2015 - 04:23 PM, said:

This is sounding a lot like the Sonic 06 arguments in the sense that there's a lot of "it had good ideas and it would have been good if not for X, Y, and Z circumstances" going around.

Even if this game looked nice, had less glitches, and was in a competent engine, given what we got, would it have been any good anyway? Or would it have gone from turd to polished turd.

Well, we don't know how much they were planning to change about the game's design. Or what got removed. So who knows.

Really the main thing I want to point out is that Sonic Boom shouldn't be seen as what Big Red Button is capable of, considering they didn't have the chance to really show it. Maybe they wouldn't have improved the game design problems if they didn't have to switch from targeting PS4/Xbox One to Wii U mid-development, but there's no way for us to know that for sure. There's no problem with blaming them all you want for how bad their games are when they get to make one without shitty corporate decisions getting in their way though.

This post has been edited by TimmiT: 22 May 2015 - 05:07 PM

[Overlord]

At the end of the day though, it's still a fairly average PS2-era platform with unappealing gameplay and designs. The only reason the latter part doesn't affect the cartoon is because it can be treated as a seperate universe with no chance of influencing the games, much like SatAM or Sonic Underground before it.