#and a realistic response to when the game devs patch it out

[therestofmyfandoms]

its great to see that Sunraku's cheese strats are still plentiful. and how accurate this anime continues to be about how video games are.

his exploit for farming crystal scorpions by quickly teleporting in and out and making them kill themselves gets patched out? easy, just figure out a way to make them fall off a cliff instead, using a double-jump ability to negate the fall damage for himself.

god i fucking love this show

[soyosauce]

Cyberpunk 2077: Is This To Be An Empathy Test?

Cyberpunk 2077 is an adaptation and extrapolation of the popular tabletop pen-and-paper role-playing game Cyberpunk, originally published in 1988. The video game uses an extrapolation of the setting and Interlock system, translated to video game format.

When I finished the game, credits rolled. And rolled. And rolled. More than 15 minutes went by.

Now, days later, as I reflect on more than 70 hours of playtime, Cyberpunk 2077 feels like many people have had their hands in the pie. Its strengths and weaknesses stem from its massive ambition, marketing, and promises.

Different Experiences

I played CP2077 on a Ryzen 7 3700x with 32 gigs of RAM and an RX 2700 GPU. I was able to get around 35 FPS at 1440p without noticeable drops (except when looking in mirrors), and I played on ultra-settings without ray tracing on. I began playing it with the rest of the PC consumers with the day 1 patch.

As a crafted experience, I can say that it is the most impressive looking game I've ever played, and my playthrough seems to be a fortunate one, with maybe a handful of glitches or bugs across the entire 70 hours. None of which were remotely game-breaking. I was never unable to progress in the story. I never had a crash. The most annoying thing I experienced was sometimes crosshairs from a gun would continue to stay onscreen after it was holstered.

I mention this because I think a major component of why I come away with a positive experience is because my computer could deliver the intended experience. And Cyberpunk 2077 is unrivaled in its execution of a funneled narrative. Characters and environments have never felt more genuine and cinematic.

The sound design is some of the best I've heard, and it's perfect in every aspect of the game. From the sound of a throaty exhaust to the scraping of metal-tipped hands against hardwood, the sound is superb and adds to the immersion.

 The World

With a setting as old as Cyberpunk, there will be consumers who are familiar with the setting and have a grasp on the worldbuilding. For the uninitiated, however—of which, I think most customers will be—the aesthetic and gameplay elements the marketing team used in advertisements will be the primary hook. The game doesn’t go out of its way to communicate that it is anything more than that, either.

What was most compelling about Night City was the meticulous detail and care devs clearly put into every nook and cranny of the city. Distinct and disparate, no part of it feels reused or like its filler. It is the most gorgeous and well-realized environment I've encountered in a video game.

Yet the gangs, fixers, and side jobs located within it feel one dimensional when viewed from a macro, worldbuilding perspective.

Typical fixer missions are varied enough and have different small bits of story, but usually just elucidating that specific mission and its characters. You’ll find little bits of lore some of the time, which augment the siloed stories, but often don’t give a wider context to help situate the faction you’re interacting with.

The gangs seem to have a central theme, but I never learned why they were actually there from a worldbuilding perspective, beyond the fact that the game wants you to be looting and shooting.

Culturally, the gang elements are too often a pastiche and don’t feel real. They have scripted lines that are often dehumanizing and feel unrealistic. Some of them don't even make any sense. They'll find a dead body and start yelling for you to come out, "cunt", or some other misogynistic pejorative. How do they know it's a woman? Making them all say and act that way feels so cheap, encouraging you to take them out because they're demonstrably “bad” people. And it doesn’t matter what kind of mission it is. Context doesn’t matter.

With the bits of lore you’ll find all over the place (often repeated), it feels like a missed opportunity to not humanize and characterize the gang identities as a whole; even if you are spending most of your time mowing them down, at least you’d come to understand why the city is the way it is and what its general makeup is better than just knowing which gang claims which area of the city.

The world feels overly concerned with aesthetics that the player never gets context for, so it feels like a caricature used for aesthetic purposes only.

For instance, Arasaka, the megacorporation controlling/running Night City, has a highly traditional, tyrannical, Japanese businessman who has had his life extended with cybernetics. He’s over one hundred years old and controls Arasaka with an iron fist. The inference on my part is that locations in Night City with heavy Asian aesthetics are there because of this megacorp’s influence. But it still feels strange because, in other lore given, the city has been run by other corporations not that long ago and had other cultural influences asserted. So why is Little China, Japantown, and Kabuki a weird pastiche and the only place that seems to assert its cultural influence on the city? When you enter other areas, they don’t look like they’re trying to recreate foreign cultures. Is it because of the Arasaka influence? Possibly, but I never found any lore that explained it. Visually, this aesthetic dominated my playthrough.

The result is a siloed microworld that feels like it might be there simply to justify some of the predominantly Asian gangs, who seem to be basically just cyberized yakuza and come up fairly often in fixer missions. The main story also springboards off some of these locations, so the game really wants this look to make an impression on the player.

When you explore in-depth, all of the interactable, consumable portions of the city have a faux quality because you can only look at them. Sometimes you can buy food from a couple of vendors and clothes, but everything exists solely to be interacted with in a hyper-specific way, rather than extrapolated from a perspective divorced from what would be merely aesthetically interesting and actually realistic enough to let V feel like a character that is a part of this world.

You can sleep with and date a few different people, depending on your gender presentation, but the relationship's extent beyond that varies. There are some texts between characters, but you don't get to, say, go home and do anything with them. Their interactions with you in person are the same as though you had phoned them.

You can talk to people on the sidewalk, but they have a regurgitated one-liner and then go back to what they're doing. You can't go up to a gang member and talk to them because once they see you, they’ll attack you if you get too close.

The only things that feel genuinely next level are the prescriptive story elements. And that's okay! It just doesn't jive with the level of detail or how much you think you'll be able to interact with things when you first see them. Marketing makes it seem like the world at large may be something you can interact with, but those all end up being the curated narratives.

Because the worldbuilding framework is from a first-wave cyberpunk perspective, unfortunately, pitfalls like techno-orientalism are prevalent.

The themes around the commodification of those things that make us human, from our body, faith, and art, are all interesting themes present in the genre—but here they are skewed toward fetishizing minorities and subcultures, just as first-wave cyberpunk texts tended to do.

V is ostensibly a cyberpunk and it follows that they would be a part of the same subgroup as the minorities who are underrepresented and lacking nuance in the CP2077 world, but V is actually traversing the story with their only integration into a subculture being that they’re a mercenary. With few exceptions, they all seem to not really share punk values, either. Some take jobs from corps (you certainly can if you want), some don’t like the corps but aren’t particularly anti-establishment or pro direct action. Most just seem to hang out at a bar. You don’t hear about what they do on the news or in the world. You don’t get jobs from fixers that are ideologically aligned with being punk. And you don’t integrate with any other subcultures when out of the main narratives.

The exploitation of people and the world's general themes and sensibilities still feel firmly rooted in the late 80s, early 90s. It is not aware enough to fully realize an actual subculture or even the dynamics of criminal elements in the city, so it frames the story from a mainstream perspective for mass appeal.

The problem is that, with so many people consuming the game, this becomes the default that those consumers will adopt. It has a responsibility precisely because it is so popular and will become a part of the general intellect. Rather than be progressive with its themes and push mainstream depiction of cyberpunk to something in line with what can be found in literature today, it is regressive.

Ultimately, the worldbuilding is the most disappointing aspect of Cyberpunk 2077. The main narratives, however, are a different story.

 Story

Arguably, the most important thing for a role-playing game experience is the story. In 2077, you play V, a mercenary on the edges of society trying to make it big in Night City. In classic cyberpunk genre fashion, a chance at a big score drops into your relatively inexperienced hands, and you seize it. A heist is planned; it doesn't go as planned—and Johnny Silverhand, a long-dead anarchist and misogynistic jerk—basically a proto-typical embodiment of 70’s rock ethos—ends up in your head. He has his own agenda, and V can either go along, get along, or make their own decisions about what to do next. For the most part.

The story beats are as meticulously crafted as corners of Night City. The character animations are the most advanced I’ve ever seen—: they’ll smoke a cigarette for a portion of the conversation, stub it out, then get up and pace nervously while delivering their lines. Their emotions will be written on their face and flow naturally. They'll touch items or other people in the scene. They look and act like real people and sound like it too.

There’s a 4-part storyline with a trans character in which you just won’t ever learn their story unless you talk with them and earn their trust. You can go through the whole narrative and help them out (or not), and never learn much about them. But if you spend the time and ask questions, you'll always get something from these storylines, even if they initially seem to be just another gig on the map.

Because the game's worldbuilding, including in-game ads, is blind to its own defaultism, stories like this are absolutely vital. I wish there were more of them and I hope the free DLC forthcoming are things like this.

2077 is populated with genuine, human moments. They communicate why you should care about the city and the people you encounter. And most importantly: these moments define V as much as the main storyline.

Whether intentional or purely a byproduct of how each facet of the game was developed, these stories augment the play experience a tremendous amount.

What I remember most is finding out if Johnny can, and will, actually change or if he's just trying to manipulate me, discovering how my decisions alter the way he interacts with me, and going down a rabbit-hole, sex trafficking narrative that initially feels a bit too archetypical, only to have it morph into a multi-part story that rooted V's narrative in an emotional and impactful way.

These are the stories that you can actually, meaningfully change. And because I did them all before the main storyline, they all felt like they meshed well with my V’s overall story.

Of course, you could do the main story right away and then go back and do these side stories. I think the experience would be quite different because of the knowledge and relationship you have with Johnny at the end of the main story experience, though.

The main storyline has multiple endings; I've experienced four of them, and they all deliver fairly well on expectations. These endings do not consider anything that isn’t a main or side job, which is labeled as such in your log. Your relationships with the main characters do change the endings slightly, but they don't change the overall outcomes for V and Johnny. This made the game's main attraction for me the fleshed-out side narratives and a few other mysterious side jobs that crop up without a fixer giving them to you.

These other stories were more enjoyable because I felt like I really mattered and could actually mess them up. The main storyline is only preoccupied with whether or not you did X and, if so, you can see the Y ending. It felt like it had lower stakes.

 Conclusion

I do feel like 2077 is a new way to consume an immersive role-playing video game experience. It's unfortunate and unfair to many people that multiple promises the game makes cannot be fulfilled unless they can experience it on a particular platform (with a fairly sizeable amount of money in the investment). A decent computer to play it on is the best way, and it’s expensive if you want to max out absolutely everything. Next-generation consoles aren't even optimized for it yet. Last generation consoles are struggling. Crashes, bugs, poor textures, and framerates.

What is Cyberpunk 2077 when it can’t replicate the ideal delivery for its desired experience?

So much of what made the experience singular and noteworthy for me comes down to how life-like and human the people I came to care about the most in the game looked and acted. Take that veneer away, and the cracks in the façade appear.

Doing most of the side content before the main jobs gave my V a meta-narrative: they were a ruthless killer that would do pretty much whatever a fixer asked of them. Those were the expectations set by the world outside of the story. But then V morphs into a person confronting that life, questions who they want to be, and what it takes to thrive in Night City when you hit the main narratives. That’s why I had a positive experience. And that’s why I’ll return to the city and do things differently.

Ironically, Cyberpunk 2077's overall game experience relies on technology to build empathy between the player and the main cast. Yet, the world outside of the main narrative denies that same empathy to the denizens and factions it populates Night City with. If the platform you’re playing on can’t effectively utilize the demanding Red Engine developed for Cyberpunk 2077, the most likely outcome is an experience devoid of the only substantive thing it has to offer.

[landsoflightanddark]

Interesting things I learned from “An Extraordinary Story”, Part 2

This post will cover part of the “Story Playthrough” which is the longest chapter of the book.  It goes through each section of the game and the devs discuss why they made the decisions they made.  It starts with some AMAZING maps of the Nest.  This post will go from the beginning of the game to the collapsing bridge sequence from E3 2015. - Ueda wanted to get the player right into the action.  In SotC it’s awhile until you even see a colossus, but in this game Trico is one of the first things you see. - The key-shaped patches of grass seen throughout the game are actually supposed to be beds for the Tricos. - The first area had the most time spent on it during development. - Do you ever see really detailed concept art for a game that doesn’t end up matching what’s in the game at all?  Ueda hates that.  It’s why most of the concept art for these games is pretty sketchy and heavily resembles the final product.  They build the bones of the level first, then sketch out ways to change it and things to add in it. - The mirror room is NOT under the white tower but the “door” that seems sealed up in the final game does connect to it.  Ueda doesn’t talk much about this area, but does say this (which I already posted): “ I’m not saying that it connects The Last Guardian and Shadow, directly, but the spring (pool) is a thing like the Mirror, and the underside of the Mirror could be connected to the world on the other side of the pool.  Another world could exist on the other side, though...Maybe it’s a world of things that haven’t happened, or maybe it is the world of Shadow...You think about what it means.”  So, think about it what it means everybody.

- The interior of the white stone has a honeycomb structure that suggests strength.  This can be seen in the crack though it’s hard to see apparently. - The mirror was originally supposed to be a “weird bird-shaped gun”.  It’s the only one in TLG’s world.  It’s supposed to be similar to the ancient bronze mirrors of the Japanese shaman queen Himiko.  The handle has two Trico heads on it, and the inward side supposedly has “familiar symbols”.  Maybe something from the other games? - The full list of animals that can be found in the game: Fish, lizards, doves, bats, butterflies, moths, and small worm-like bugs that are very hard to see. - The pillars of rocks Trico jumps on early in the game were designed to be plausible and realistically hold Trico’s weight. - The small arches in the forest area are mentioned as bearing a similarity to the larger ones in SotC and Ico, but there’s no stated reason for it.  They’re referred to as “athletic arches” because the boy can climb on them.  Of the windmill and the archways you first see the other Trico on, which bear a similarity to Ico, the team says they’re “a matter of game design, not an intentional visual design ethos.”  I don’t know what that means because those structures aren’t even important.  That stuff was totally intentional y’all. - After genDesign was formed, Japan Studio was responsible for the “creative direction and vision” of the game, and GD focused on the execution, building and implementing things, Ai, and game engine programming.  Considering that the game has Ueda’s vision all over it, I’m...Not really sure what Japan Studio did, just from reading that. - CONFIRMED: The Master controls the Tricos through their horns, not the helmets.  Trico was kept in the cave so his horns could grow back.  The cage in the antenna room is so the Tricos can’t fly away. - Some early sketches of the Yoroi give them bird-like faces.  They have the same designs on their armor as many of the blocks in the environment, which shows that they have common origins.  So, that might disprove the theory that the entire Nest except the white stone structures was built before the Master and Yoroi ever got there. - BIG quote from Ueda here: “It’s not just the barrels themselves that matter for the tricos.  The chosen ones aren’t transformed into barrels or anything, but into something much more important - and as a byproduct, the stuff that’s in the barrels is produced.  It is probably related to the mist that comes from the pots, and the energy that powers the Yoroi.  But at first I was thinking about the sarcophagus in the mirror room, and that energy being used to revive or bring to life whatever is in it.” So...There’s some of your theories confirmed right there.  Love this book. - The designers think of the locations as pre-ruined, they don’t think of them as they would have been and then ruin them after. - The reason a lot of the rooms don’t seem to have real purposes beyond being puzzles is that they were first designed with gameplay in mind, and then from a narrative perspective after, which is how Ueda’s teams have always worked.  “Applying real-world logic to TLG’s world would just result in something a lot like our own world.” one of the devs says. - The ways you can command Trico are detailed more here than they are in the game. I believe this information was online before, but it may not be widely known that the O button can be used to focus Trico’s attention on a specific object.  The book also confirms that it’s best to wait for Trico to follow a single command, and not spam it with several.  Facing both the boy and the camera in the direction you want Trico to move will help as well. - There was originally more stealth gameplay in the game, which can be seen in one of the early trailers. - Ueda made a cute little 3D map showing the path most players probably take to get around the rafters stealth rooms. - The amount of butterflies flying around will increase from one to two to three as you get closer to a barrel.  Ueda’s signature is actually in the texture on the butterflies’ wings.  They also have a relation to the boys’ tattoos and to a legend of butterflies being or taking people’s spirits. - As we’ve heard, the glass eyes are inspired by “Toriyoke”, round objects used to scare birds. - If you throw all of the Yoroi helmets used to break the two glass eyes on the wall (right before the E3 2015 area) down into the last room, they’ll reappear.  There was originally a barrel dispenser that was there to make sure you didn’t run out of things to throw, but the devs thought it clashed with the technology used in the rest of the game. - There is a gong in the boy’s village with the eye design on it that they bang when Trico arrives. - According to the book, when the game was on PS3 there were no cutscenes, it had trouble running at 30fps, and levels had to be changed by opening a debug menu - they were not seamless like they are now.  Give Ueda’s apparent insistence (in a Dengeki Playstation interview before the game came out) that the game would have worked on PS3, could he have been thinking of doing Ico-style loading between rooms?

[andiguinness]

Misadventures in Gaming, GTA Edition

Sooooo, you may be wondering why I didn’t post anything last night/this morning. Well, long story short, the whole of my evening was consumed trying to pull something I wasn’t meant to really pull off, namely: Running a modded form of Grand Theft Auto San Andreas on Mac.

While I have GTA IV, the 3D games hold a special place to me in my late teens.  I still think Vice City was the peak of the entire GTA series in terms of gameplay, story, and general aesthetics (plus the 80s music selection was rockin). San Andreas, while not as good as Vice City, nevertheless was amazing. While the game’s size eventually got dwarfed by later sandbox and sandbox-style games, none have been able to capture it’s scope.  While, say, GTA V is realistically big, San Andreas felt big. Considering it was a state with three big cities, the size of each of these cities didn’t ultimately matter. It still felt like a big place. When Psychedelic Eyeball started streaming 3D-era GTA games again, I felt compelled to do the same with San Andreas (I played III (which hasn’t aged well at all) and Vice City in 2016).

Now, the problem with this game is that it suffers from the aging issues that also plagued the earlier 3D GTA games, namely being from the HD transition era. When it was released to PC in 2004, it was using something called anamorphic widescreen to compensate for the fact it was developed in the original SD ratio of 4:3.  The problem with this is it makes the screen wider, and it just doesn’t look good. Case in point:

As you can see, while the game itself looks kind of okay, everything in the HUD looks stretched out. Also, the camera lens being up close would leave a lot of camera issues.

Back in 2013, a couple modders addressed this issue by changing the horizontal field of view so that it was no longer fixed. This correlates with how games functioned after 2005, when HDTV became more common. It leaves a more desirable result that reflects modern displays:

Of course, this wasn’t the only problem with the game’s aging. In 2013, Rockstar released a mobile version of San Andreas (don’t play it unless you really enjoy touch controls for some reason). Alongside that, they suddenly released a new patch in the game for Steam. While it made some adjustments, such as restoring some mod abilities, it also removed 17 (or 18) tracks from the soundtrack because of “licensing” issues (I swear, if I had a nickel for every jamoke IP agreement, my student loan debts would be cleared). So we lost gems such as this one:

In any case, the solution to this problem presented itself in the form of “downgrading,” or patching it to the original version of the game, i.e. 1.00. Easy peasy, right? Not when it comes to Macs, unfortunately. Why? A little more history, shall we?

Shortly after the PC release of San Andreas in 2004, some modders uncovered functional code for a sex mini-game that was left intact but dummied out of the main game, nicknamed “Hot Coffee” because of the triggered moment in the larger dating minigame (before “Netflix and chill,” “getting some coffee” was our post-date sex euphemism! Remember that, kids). In response to the outcry caused by various concerned Christians and parents in the U.S., including Jack Thompson (and for the love of Pete, don’t bring up feminists, they had little-to-nothing to do with this one, you dinguses), Rockstar went apeshit to fix the problem. For the PC version, this meant a patch that disabled modding outright. This version was known as v. 1.01, and was the latest version for 9 years (the so-called v. 2.0 is 1.01 with a simple piracy check. V. 3.0 was the one released in 2013).

Now, in 2010, Rockstar released the Mac OS X version of San Andreas, as part of a “Trilogy” package containing the 3 games in the 3D era. Instead of natively porting the game, however, Rockstar took the lazy man’s porting route (such as they did with the console to PC ports of later GTAs). In this case, they simply placed the Windows game in a Cider “wrapper” (Cider was a specialized emulator that allowed Windows programs to run on other OSes, usually games) and packaged it as a Mac app. This was back when devs understood Macs to be a viable gaming platform, but had little interest/money to properly port the game or hire a porting dev like Feral or Aspyr.

Now for the interesting part: The version of San Andreas run on this was v. 1.01. However, likely because Cider and its successor Cedega became dormant in 2011 (their developer now functions as a real estate backer ala Konami), Rockstar never bothered to update the Mac version back in 2013. So if you buy San Andreas for Mac on Steam, you’re able to listen to the entire soundtrack.

Unfortunately, as I spent 4 or 5 hours shuttling back and forth between Windows (via Bootcamp) and MacOS uncovering, you can’t run a downgraded version of San Andreas on Mac. If I had to speculate why, it would have something to do with the Cider wrapper itself being hardcoded to the specific executable - since it didn’t recognize a downgraded GTA moved from Windows to Mac via thumb drive. It may also be because the executable was modified to work with the wrapper, since none of the downgrading tools used recognized the executable file from the Mac version. (For those wondering, yes, I am using a bought copy of the game off Steam. Otherwise I wouldn’t know these details)

In any case, TL;DR: I spent 4-5 hours trying to make modded San Andreas work on Mac, then gave up and spent 2 hours playing the game on Windows. Ah well!

I’ll try to make this up with 2 posts over the next 24 hours. One is definitely 3DX related.

[cellerityweb]

World of Tanks – Rebuilding Trust

For developers to know what players want means for them to listen to what players have to say. Regaining the community’s trust was an important step in World of Tanks success story and here’s how that went.

For World of Tanks devs, 2016 began with redefining how they handle game development. If they had a boxed game, they would have taken a break to rethink their approach – but it wasn’t an option with an online project like World of Tanks. A little over four months and several small updates after Rubicon, the team made a literally loud comeback with 9.14, delivering on the promise of more realistic vehicle movement physics and taking the experience up a notch with deep and immersive new sound. No longer fixated on releasing an update every other month, they went on to address a few more issues that tankers were vocal about, while working on fundamental problems like SPGs and matchmaker on the newly-launched Sandbox server. Deeper under the hood, Wargaming was going through a massive transition, triggered by Rubicon and touching on every aspect of their operations, both internal and player-facing. The change began with the creation of a Product Group, a small team of executives who now decide where World of Tanks is heading.

We’re handing it over to the two of them, Thaine Lyman and Milos Jerabek, to talk about the lessons learnt from Rubicon and the transformation the team went through.

Nimble Decision-Making

As a company gets bigger, it’s easy for the soul of it to change a bit. For me, the greatest thing about Wargaming is that, although it scaled from 100 to over 4,000 people in several years, it managed to keep its soul intact. The »young, scrappy, and hungry�� start-up spirit, which you’d usually attribute to smaller studios, is still here. No matter the differences people have, positions they hold or languages they speak, they’re all gamers, driven by a love of games and desire to create experiences other gamers could rally around. They bring their talent and their passion to work every day.

However, the fast growth the company went through, had its consequences. The ability for finding quick solutions was lost as the number of parties involved in decision-making grew and the sole connection between parties became scarce. We ended up with too many people who could block a decision by saying »no« to it and the near absence of dialogue between devs, marketing and publishing teams across offices. So when Rubicon happened, it didn’t come out of nowhere: it was the direct result of problems that had been brewing for quite some time. We actually passed that point of no return and realized we needed to rethink the way we operate.

From left to right: Thaine Lyman (WoT Product Director), Paul Barnett (WoT Deputy Creative Director, Exploitation Research), Harkonnen (blogger), AgingJedi (YouTuber), Quickybaby (YouTuber/Streamer). More than 40 so-called Community Contributors and devs were coming together at Tankfest 2017 to exchange thoughts, feedback and ideas.

A lot needed to be done in a short time and quickly, so we started from the top by organizing a Product Group. Basically, we brought together World of Tanks »founding fathers« forming a steering committee with key people from development and publishing and lead by CEO. It’s also when Slava Makarov who then headed the R&D division returned as Creative Director for World of Tanks. The group was to make numerous important decisions, cut through red tape and different points of view, get a plan on paper and implement it. This worked out pretty well and it unblocked us, so we could get moving again.

This larger group that was operating with direct involvement from our CEO had its moment in time. Without it, we wouldn’t have overcome the huge initial roadblocks. However, once we were past the crisis and moving to day-to-day operational activities, involvement from so many parties was no longer needed. We created an efficient decision body but getting it into one room was a tricky task. Imagine how hard it was to get 12 extremely busy people (most of them executives) to meet! To stop the Product Group from becoming one of the bottlenecks it was designed to fight, we went on to a more nimble structure.

We scaled it back and went to the four-person group we have today (Product Director, Publishing Director, Creative Director, Marketing Director and Development Director). It enabled faster, more agile decision-making and made us personally accountable for our actions. If it’s just five people, it’s these five who are either doing it well or messing it up. It’s all on this group. They make decisions, they deal with consequences. Of course, it can be hard to get even five people together. It’s not an issue with five people fully dedicated to a project and whose lives revolve around it. Even if they are in different places and time zones, they can generally get things resolved quickly.

One Game, One Team

Artiom and Thaine answering questions from the community during a live-stream at Wargaming Fest.

I (Milos) joined the team shortly after Rubicon; found myself in the eye of the storm so to speak – but I was happy. I’ve been playing World of Tanks since its Closed Beta in 2010 and experienced Rubicon as a player. Like the rest of the community, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that Wargaming wasn’t listening and being a member of the team now, I was actually able to be a part to change it.

If you look at it from a player perspective, whether you are spending a few hours in random battles, discussing the game on forums, or duking it out on the Global Map, it’s all World of Tanks to you. Should you stumble upon a feature that isn’t working the way it’s supposed to and get no response from the devs when you bring up on the forum, will you bother figuring out which department, office or team let you down? Of course not. If there’s a fault somewhere, it’s the game that is faulty and the entire team takes the blame. It’s best worded in the »One game, one team« motto we live by now, and this approach goes far beyond establishing a closer bond with departments outside development.

Slava Makarov (WoT Product Director) and Anton Pankov (WoT Publishing Director) during the Grand Finals live-stream.

When I joined, the expertise was spread all around the development unit. Another issue rooted in Wargaming’s fast growth led to a problematic situation: team leads weren’t managing specialists with the same expertise, so ideas and experience sometimes were not in line with everyone involved. Unfortunately, we had a structure that was working this way. Speaking to designers one day, I was amazed to discover they barely sync with each other. They were sitting on the other floor and would only meet for weekly dev sync-ups to discuss what’s going on. It’s impossible to preserve and spread expertise with a structure like that in place. If you want it to work, it needs to be programmers with programmers, managers with managers, and designers with designers.

We reshuffled the organizational structure, building it around expertise and areas of talent and putting experts in the field ahead of teams. To pull it off, we had to restart the team. There were multiple ways to do this. Choosing between a step-by-step approach and a one-time change, we went with the second. Actually, we didn’t have much choice. We had to move on with the game and couldn’t allow ourselves to take a break. It’s a bit easier with boxed games where you can stop for a month with no harm to the product. Online MMOs are a different story. You can’t go to players and say »Guys, we’ve got some internal issues to deal with so we’re taking a sabbatical. No patches for the next half a year.« With an online game like World of Tanks, we’re constantly aiming at a moving target. It’s not just chasing the train. You’re chasing it in several cars, each driving in an opposite direction and all has been done to make our game better for our players.

Dialogue with Players

The player community had lots of questions in the months after Rubicon but we couldn’t answer them instantly. Our message wasn’t unified across regions. So before making any big steps in terms of development we had to fix both the tone and the content of our communication with players. We had to share the same messages with players, whichever language they speak and have a sound strategy as to what we’re saying, how we’re wording it and how much context we provide.

Only a year ago, all World of Tanks announcements, news etc. were first written in Russian, then translated into English. One day we sat down and looked at the Russian and English articles covering the same topic only to discover they didn’t convey the same meaning. Feeding players just with positive moments would not be honest towards our players and we wouldn’t cover difficulties and problems we’re facing along the way in just as much detail. The first step to fixing it was admitting the game’s fundamental problems.

The very way we shared news had to change. We went from informing the community in pretty much a declarative manner with little to no explanation to providing the reasoning behind the decisions we make and breaking these reasons and/or changes down in detail, so that players could see our train of thought. If you’re playing World of Tanks, you don’t want to know what developers are doing; you learn it by playing the game. What you really need to know is why they’re doing it, just as you want to know the next steps. Not all problems can be fixed at once, and knowing an action plan lets you see things in perspective.

Considering how big some problems were, we openly admitted it would take time and kept the community in the loop as we worked on solutions.

Success for us really comes from player feedback. If we’re doing well, the players let us know. If there’s room for improvement, they’ll tell us loud and clear. It’s only in collaboration with them that we could further evolve the project. Every new milestone we reach, we reach it through contributions from both the community and the development team.

Evolving the game together with players is not a marketing stance slapped on as an afterthought. It’s becoming a part of our DNA. We’ve gone from informing and imposing our own opinion and decisions to listening, explaining choices and letting everyone know what’s going on. We now actively encourage players to speak up, provide their input and act upon their suggestions when introducing new features and improving the game. We’re just getting started and have the guts to admit there’s a lot of room for improvement in our communication. For example, we’ve been doing regular livestreams with developers and meeting with community contributors to ensure we’re all on the same page on features and future developments. However, we didn’t pay as much attention to their concerns on balance tweaks to vehicles. We’re going to streamline our dialogue on these in the coming months.

Mentality Shift

At one point, basically anyone in the development team could say »No, it’s a bad idea.« And then whatever the team was working on was suddenly thrown into chaos. There was no long-term plan, no clear list of priorities that were aligned between Minsk development, the exec team in Cyprus and the publishing offices across the world.

A lot of the work went into defining the game’s biggest holes and problems; what we should be doing, when and why. No one knows the game better than the people who created it. So we started by getting the devs’ input around what they felt could benefit the game from a technical standpoint, art standpoint, creative direction and so on. The next step was finding a nice balance between the devs’ ideas on addressing critical issues and cool and interesting new features.

Take matchmaker or arty, for example. They’ve been the biggest sources of player frustration for years. Every new patch would come out and even if it had cool new features, the first feedback was »It doesn’t fix matchmaker.« or »What’s with arty? When are you gonna get it right?«

“We needed to fix the holes in the boat and it’s not like the dev team didn’t know about these fundamental problems or wasn’t capable. In reality, there was a lot of disagreement around what fixing them should involve.”

The team (development, marketing, publishing offices, HQ … everyone!) knew there were serious problems but they were terrified of the impact the changes might have. To help them overcome it, we had to make them see that, first of all, changes were needed; second of all, we were never going to get a 100% positive reaction to some of them but what was happening then was even worse – we’re boring our players by not making any changes! Anything’s better than that. Slava Makarov and Andrey Biletskiy became the main driving force, pushing through ideas to create a strong holistic vision that allowed the team start moving in the right direction.

Proving Ground

Our players often joke Wargaming can never do anything on the first try and it’s completely fine. Is it possible to make everyone happy? Of course not! Take twenty people and you get twenty opinions. What we have to do is find a solution, which would click with as many out of these twenty as possible. The second equally crucial aspect here is reacting on feedback with quick fixes, which is virtually impossible if you’re introducing a massive change in a version.

Supertest (the first testing phase of a feature) happens roughly eight weeks before the version release. There’s little you can do in eight weeks. If an issue is small, you apply a few changes to fix it but it’s so small it’s not going to affect the overall experience. If something just isn’t working, you can remove it completely but there’s no way to fix it in eight weeks. Fixing the game’s core with that workflow was an impossible mission and that’s when the Sandbox server came about.

It was a completely new idea for the company: a proving ground where we could test fundamental features months (if not years) ahead of their release, together with people who’re actually playing the game rather than just our QA team. Testing a fresh-baked feature internally is one thing. People who’re directly involved in development view it all from what you would call an insider’s perspective. When we bring in players, we see a much bigger picture.

Getting feedback from people we’ve never played with, allows us to look into their preferences and get to the bottom of things, discovering issues that we’ve never viewed as problematic.

Sandbox also attracts players of different cultural backgrounds and with different levels of skill. We aren’t limited to testing what’s nearly finished: we share with them an idea, find out where they stand on it and bury it or keep working on it, depending on their feedback. Another important thing here is that we’re being completely honest about what we’re doing every step of the way.

We learnt a lot along the way. Take a look at the 1st iteration of Sandbox. It was way too slow and over-packed with stuff. We didn’t have a solid roadmap with the next steps. Finally, we didn’t communicate what we were doing properly. Instead of explaining why and how a new system of vehicle roles was going to improve the experience, we focused solely on what we were doing. For the 2nd iteration, the Sandbox server had its own blog, where the dev team briefs players on every new batch of features they roll out, providing the rationale behind tweaks and explaining the hypothesis they’re looking to test with them.

When conducting a postmortem for the 1st iteration of Sandbox, we analyzed it from two perspectives: gameplay and the way we presented it to players. The idea we tested was interesting but it didn’t click. We tried something that looked perfect on paper thinking »OK, it’s got legs, it makes sense, let’s go for it.« Had we done it in a version, it would have been Rubicon 2.0. We were wiser this time, so we did it in Sandbox. We tried it on a limited number of vehicles and, without actually rebalancing the entire game, saw that players didn’t want it; so went back to the drawing board.

The 1st iteration was an eye-opening experience in many ways. We realized players didn’t see a problem where we thought it was: in vehicle roles, which we considered obsolete. So we didn’t just go and devise a new solution. We went back to the very beginning, rethinking what the game’s key problems were, to formulate what we now call the »unholy trinity«: matchmaking, arty and maps. Once the groundwork was in place, we could start working towards fixing these, putting big teams to work.

About the Author:

Milos Jerabek is World of Tanks Development Director at Wargaming

Before joining Wargaming, Milos spent four years at Remedy Entertainment where he started as a level designer and climbed the ranks to become Production Director. As a Development Director, he coordinates communication between teams within the Development Department and ensures they work together to deliver high-quality gameplay experience to players.

    Thaine Lyman

is World of Tanks Product Director

Thaine joined Wargaming in 2015. Before that, he spent over 10 years at Activision where he worked as Executive Producer for the »Call of Duty« series and as VP of Production. In his current role, he works with the executive team, development and publishing teams, regional GMs, and operational teams to ensure World of Tanks provides a best-in-class experience.

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