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EA Offensive: Former Retro Heads/Metroid Prime devs ink deal with EA.
Sheep
Registered User, __BANNED USERS regular
Registered User, __BANNED USERS regular
So...
BioWare.
Valve.
Pandemic.
And now a part of Retro?
If you were warming up to EA recently (and who could blame you?), there's even more incentive to give them a second (or third... or fourth) chance into warming our cold, clamy, nerdy, gamer hearts with their gaming intentions.
Some backstory... Months ago, several Retro big wigs were unceremoniously escorted from the premises.. There was a big hooplah about it. Tons of speculation. Etc etc.
Now we have INFORMATION.
From Kotaku:
All three consoles, you say?
New IP, you say?
So, basically, crank out the ideas, let someone else do the grunt work, and make sure it comes out clean? I can dig that.
http://kotaku.com/5049329/metroid-prime-devs-eye-360-ps3-for-future-games
BioWare.
Valve.
Pandemic.
And now a part of Retro?
If you were warming up to EA recently (and who could blame you?), there's even more incentive to give them a second (or third... or fourth) chance into warming our cold, clamy, nerdy, gamer hearts with their gaming intentions.
Some backstory... Months ago, several Retro big wigs were unceremoniously escorted from the premises.. There was a big hooplah about it. Tons of speculation. Etc etc.
Now we have INFORMATION.
From Kotaku:
Three of the key developers behind Nintendo's popular Metroid Prime series recently jumped ship to form a new development studio that will be dedicated to creating games for all three platforms under a publishing deal with Electronic Arts, the publisher announced today.
All three consoles, you say?
Armature Studio, located in Austin, Texas, is headed by Mark Pacini, Todd Keller and Jack Mathews, the former Game Director, Art Director and Principal Technology Engineer of the Nintendo franchise.
In a recent interview with Kotaku, Pacini said that the trio formed the new company some time in April and signed their exclusive publishing deal with EA two to three months later.
"EA approached us with this really interesting business model of creating a small studio that is only comprised of industry veterans," Pacini said. "The goal is to create new IP with a very, very small team and to produce a game without having to grow that team."
New IP, you say?
The deal with Electronic Arts is an experiment of sorts, Pacini said. Under the agreement, the studio will report to EA General Manager Lou Castle as part of EA's secretive Blueprint Division. Castle is acting Executive Producer of the Armature Studio games. Instead of operating like typical game development studios, the core team at Armature Studio will work on game prototypes. Once a game is ready for development a bulk of that work would be shifted to an external team or another studio, while the Armature people would follow the project as directors.
So, basically, crank out the ideas, let someone else do the grunt work, and make sure it comes out clean? I can dig that.
"EA has been very very supportive of all of our efforts."
http://kotaku.com/5049329/metroid-prime-devs-eye-360-ps3-for-future-games
Sheep on
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God Metroid Prime's art director with next gen tech = SEX
"I haz ideas but you need to do all the work?"
This is going to fail. Hard. Glad Nintendo fucking fired their asses.
The only exception of that rule I can think of is Free Radical - and judging Haze - oh how the mighty have fallen - while Rare seem to be on the rise once more.
XBL/PSN/Steam: APZonerunner
And um... is my sarcasm meter off? Or is Fyre jumping headfirst into the troll pit?
Doesn't Miyamoto work this way as well? As in, make stuff up and let others work it out while just checking in and wiping the table clean once in a while?
Make prototypes and then ship them off for external development? Interesting. It could work and could spark some actual innovation in a biz that sorely needs it, but it may depend on how much magic pixie dust they can sprinkle on the project after someone else gets their grubby hands on it. A good idea can get trounced by lousy execution.
Actually it sounds alot like the way Japan works, with TOSE and a couple other outsourcing companies that make quite a few games you have heard of. this is a very abbreviated list :
Here is a great article on them
http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3156447
At least this shows that EA is pretty goddamn serious about actually creating new IPs and game types rather than just recycling the same old licenses/shit.
This isn't outsourcing development to another studio like some Japanese companies do. This is just being a thinktank and then distantly telling a developer what to do.
The first game from this venture is going to be very uncohesive.
They would save time just letting the people they're going to outsource it to just read a design doc and make the prototype themselves.
It's just a dedicated prepro group. Seems like a fine idea to me.
This setup just screams 'pointless middleman' to me.
Umm, no.
they'll be developing the prototypes, and then acting as directors. It says NOTHING about them being hands off once the prototype is finished. And I can say this, because they wrote "the armature people would follow the project as directors."
See what they did there? they spelled it out for you.
the beauty of this is that previously these guys acted as the directors from the beginning and had grunts doing the prototyping. Now they get to focus on the prototyping and THEN move into the director role, which should actually keep things at least as focused if they were previously, if not more so.
(Not that the Wii sucks at everything, but when the main draw of a series is the beautiful environments, well, it is a bit of a handicap.)
It is EA though so role on the many iterations of these new franchises as well.
MP3 looked great, regardless of the fact that it was on the Wii. Art direction goes a very long way.
"We have a neat new idea, give us a short amount of time to knock up a prototype"
"Here is our prototype, can we have more mans to make this game?"
That seems to be working out alright so far.
Should probably wait and play it first.
A: They quit. 'Escorted from the premises' is such a misnomer that we had an entire thread on it. They left on their own devices IIRC. Also, if you ever work at a big corporation it is usually policy for someone to escort you out when you leave. Insurance purposes for one, policy for another.
B: These guys made Metroid Prime. They have impeccable design credentials and the funding to do something without any restrictions. They can blue sky something and then get huge gruntwork backing from EA once something has come together. financially it works out great for both parties.
How can you be so wrong in one post Fyre? You're usually so apt on these things.
Well true, it could be a completely different game to the one being shown all along.
Seriously though, Dead Space looks like it's going to be pretty damned awesome, and if this works in the same kind of way (come up with new ideas, produce a prototype, take it to full production) then I'm fine with that.
I will never know personally. I'm a gigantic pussy when it comes to survival horror games.
What a delicious little dose of irony it will be if EA generates praise for the funding of new IPs... and then sequalizes the hell out of them.
I'd love a whole truckload of Dead Space sequels done well. The setting is ever so much cooler than Resident Evil.
They were fired for headhunting on company time. They didn't quit of their own choice.
Plus 40 or so other Retro members and 23 Nintendo EAD members. We can't really know how well these guys can work without guidance of Nintendo's producers, but if history tells something, probably not that well*. But we will see.
* Rare, Left Field, Silicon Knights, Factor 5.
And we all know how that turned out.
Uh...what. I think you might have the colour settings on your TV a teeny bit misaligned if you think areas like Elysia and the Space Pirate homeworld (that make up massive parts of the game) are blue. :P
I'm with you on 2 though, it had a very muted colour palette. Mostly browns and dark purples as you say.
One thing the uniform colour palette did for 2 was make it feel much more organic though, rather than MP1's sharp visual distinction between the environments. I mean, if you want to break it down, Prime 1 was essentially made up of classic videogame staples like the Ice World, Fire World, Forest World, Temple World and Mechanical/Tech world.
Don't get me wrong, i'm not hating on MP1's environments by any means (if anything, they gave it charm), but saying it wasn't over-stylised is just flat-out wrong.
Wasn't metroid prime originally a third person shooter that felt like tomb raider (the tank ones) at E3...2002 I want to say? That was Retro's own design if I recall correctly until they were told to sharpen the fuck up and do it right.
It's not everything or possibly even anything, but it says something about needing a little guidance along the way.
Oh, right. I know they didn't make it themselves, but it was a great game. I'm also a big fan of anyone that spent time working with Shiggy on anything - I even tried Too Human.
I don't care if they said they were making a game about painting the wings on pixies, I'd give it a rent based on their track record.
There are some early screenshots out there on the net as well.
These three members made Metroid Prime in the same way Will Wright made Spore.
Lead designers are always far more integral to the design of a game than the 40 grunts beneath them.
Seems that there is a whole load of negativity here, as though they will fail without Nintendo. Why is that? Because Metroid Prime is one of the best games ever made by Nintendo and they had a minor influence on the game themselves? Why wouldn't you want the same guys to bring a game to a wider audience?
Minor? I wouldn't call scrapping development three times, replacing most of the development team, changing game's perspective, deciding how game would control, and introducing major elements like scanning "minor influence". Not to mention that Pacini didn't even direct first game. His first directing job was MP2.
Only one of those changes is attributed directly to Nintendo. Miyamoto pushing for first person perspective. Scanning was always part of the design but the way it was implemented was changed last minute. I think for the worse because 2 and 3 both have vastly superior scanning methods than the first in which scanning is kind of a chore.
So... what you're driving at is that Nintendo had a core design idea for the game, found the right development team, then oversaw the development of the game in a directorial role, and that was the key to Metroid Prime's success?
I love it when a thread comes full circle.