Game Development Giant

Jester naturally agreed wholeheartedly.

This is the embodiment of status.

Although Jester doesn't value reputation too much, reputation is a good thing after all, and having a reputation is much better than not having one.

Since Jester agreed to this matter, he immediately felt a fire burning in his heart. Perhaps it is the trouble of people who like to teach others. He felt that he had a mission to let the people who were about to listen to his class know why. How to play games, or rather what kind of perspective should not be used to play games.

In Jester's opinion, as a game developer, there are many taboos.

The biggest taboo is not to be arrogant.

The arrogance here refers to, never take things that you don’t understand at all, things that you have no experience of, just look at them a few times, and think, isn’t it like this, give me a few people, give me some I can do it given the time.

Why do you say this?

In fact, Jester saw some lessons from many domestic developers in later generations.

These people are not very capable, but they have a good temper.

The cowhide boasts loudly, but in fact, the cowhide is just cowhide, and it is of no use at all. What else can you get besides making people laugh?

For example, a famous domestic game producer in later generations, the chief producer of the Xuanyuan Sword series, named Yang Yuansheng, boasted such a lie in public.

I'm not bragging. Give me two hundred people and three years, and I can make The Witcher 3!

Then a group of players from a certain game who were in the same camp as the Immortal Sun kneeled down and licked Yang Yuansheng together. That kind of scene was so simple that they were sprayed out of thirty-one pages overnight.

Jester felt very unhappy when he saw it.

In fact, this matter is very simple, because the game The Witcher 3 was developed by Polish Baimao for three years, a development team of 200 people, and US$10 million, so. Yang Yuansheng, the chief planner of Xuanyuan Sword, had that sentence at the beginning.

In fact, in Jester's opinion, domestic designers say this not once or twice.

For example, Yao Zhuangxian, who is from the same school as Xuanyuan Sword, once had a similar thesis: Those foreign games are all mindless tut tut tut, and their entertainment is okay, but our games It has meaning.”

When Jester saw the news, he simply wondered how there could be such a shameless person in the world.

Whether it is connotation or entertainment. Nothing can be said about the piece of shit you Yao Zhuangxian pulled.

But later, Jester figured it out.

In fact, those who don’t know are fearless.

For example, Yang Yuansheng said that if you give me 200 people and give me three years, I can make The Witcher 3. The reason why this joke appeared is that Jester thinks that the most likely reason is that he has never played The Witcher 3 at all. Ah, he has no idea how awesome, great, and wonderful this game is.

He had no idea how awesome he was bragging.

This is not said casually, because Jester has many friends who work in domestic game manufacturers, and the designers there don't even know about game consoles. Haven't even heard of Blizzard, Valve, EA, or Ubisoft. Such people let alone play The Witcher 3. I guess they don’t even know that cdpr is Polish.

In fact, in Yang Yuansheng's eyes. Maybe he thinks The Witcher 3 is just an ordinary 3A masterpiece.

But what is a 3a masterpiece?

I used to always talk about 3a masterpieces, but I never explained them carefully. I forgot the subtitles for this a and which a, they are all inaccurate.

AAA-level masterpieces do not mean how much investment, how long it took to produce, and how many people participated - AAA-level masterpieces represent the highest production level in the industry within a certain period of time. For example, Final Fantasy 14 is a strange flower. If this game had been released in the year 2000, it would have been a AAA masterpiece in 2000, creating a legend in the industry. Even Sword 3 in 2000 would have created a precedent for mmorpg, and the overall requirement level in 2015 has become higher. , so these games have become tuition, a flower of wonder, a joke, and the model for mocking losers in my article.

The tuition fees paid by China's online game industry for so many large-scale projects have proven countless times that acquiring the ability to produce AAA-level projects does not happen overnight. It is not simply a matter of investing massive amounts of money and then recruiting hundreds of people to successfully create a 3A project. A masterpiece requires at least several generations of continuous investment and output, as well as accumulation of failures, in order to promote the birth of an excellent work.

Let’s give a simple example.

It is still the Witcher series of the small Polish factory cdpr. This game was only truly recognized as a AAA masterpiece with The Witcher 3. In the previous The Witcher 2 and The Witcher 1, it has never been No one has ever said that.

For a large-scale project, all small problems that are indispensable for small companies will lead to catastrophic consequences. Just in the research and development area, when a large-scale project is split into several pieces, each piece has There is a large amount of business that needs to be processed. After each piece is processed, the overall unity and availability must be ensured. There are also countless bugs that are difficult to deal with. How to ensure QA/QC has become a huge problem, and for so-called 3A-level masterpieces, It is synonymous with high quality, high availability, and low bugs.

A game company like Ubisoft can manage more than a thousand people at the same time, working on the same project in every corner of the world. Ubisoft is the only game company with such management and collaboration capabilities.

Most of the production time for The Witcher is about 3 years, and during the 3 years, maybe half of the time is spent on QA. This is something that domestic companies cannot consider at all. The bugs that Gu Jian had when it was released were due to insufficient QA. Typical, why is this happening? Do large projects have to be released even though they know there are bugs when they are released?

Of course not, this involves a probability issue.

If there is a bug, the probability of it occurring in a normal game is one in ten thousand. Do you think it should be dealt with? After all, 1% of bugs are more. In fact, Tianchao’s QA can eliminate bugs with 1% probability, which is already very good. However, when it was actually released, due to too many players, such as 2 million users, the average number of each user 5 games means 1,000,000 uses. What if the average number is 20?

The approximate number of starts for a 100-hour game is about 200, and the number of disk reads is about 1,500. Please multiply this data by the number of people, and then multiply by the probability of bugs...

That's really an astronomical number.

It is difficult for China's QA to do well, mainly because small manufacturers do not invest enough in QA, and it is difficult for QA to accumulate enough experience in large-scale projects. China's Internet industry has never paid enough attention to QA. However, for Internet companies, it is actually possible because the main business As long as it is placed on the server side and reduces the client's business complexity, there is no problem.

If a bug is found in an application software, it can be quickly repaired, and even reduce the business pressure on the client, simplify the client's business, and let the server take on more business. After one night, users will have no bugs tomorrow.

But for stand-alone software vendors, especially game manufacturers, you ask the game manufacturers to invest 50% of the cost in QA and QC... This is almost unimaginable in China, and the classic book The Myth of the Man and the Moon clearly states Note: QA should account for at least 50% of the entire development time.

Most of the games, especially the 3A-level masterpieces, have more single-player content, all the business is on the client, and basically all the bugs are there.

So if a 3A-level game project is planned to be developed with 200 people for 3 years, and it is run by inexperienced domestic teams, the most likely reason is that the scale is too large, resulting in a serious lack of QA in the later stage, and there are a lot of bugs in the game. , from the perspective of R\u0026D, this really needs to be done one project at a time, and QA is gradually accumulated from small projects, so that R\u0026D can be truly reliable.

In Lao Gun 5, you can feel the weakness of planning and execution in the later stages.

If you compare Laogun 5 and The Witcher 3, you will find that Laogun is full of missions on the map. In fact, except for a few main lines, the quality of side missions is lower than that in The Witcher 3.

The overall quality of The Witcher 3's branch lines is much higher than that of The Witcher 5.

Due to the accumulation of such trivial tasks, and the fact that the output of the Laogun 5 forging system is far better than the drops, many players have no motivation to complete small tasks in the later stage. As a sandbox game wizard, this problem is avoided.

So can we say that the planning of Lao Gun 5 is weaker than that of The Witcher 3?

Obviously such a comparison is unscientific. It is possible that the overall budget of Lao Gun 5 limited the planning performance.

Continuity and correlation of tasks in multiple areas. As a sandbox game, the more correlations are made, the greater the workload will be and the more fun it will be.

The development cost of Lao Gun 5 should be around 50 million, and based on inflation and the difference in wages between the United States and Eastern Europe, The Witcher is about the same amount. Why is the development cost almost the same, but the experience in this area is so different?

Probably during the planning, R\u0026D and planning were not well coordinated, and the final execution of the planning was deviated, resulting in scattered tasks, no itinerary task network, and the entire worldview relying too much on a few large main lines.

This is just a list using the triple-A masterpiece Lao Gun 5. Even the game design of Lao Gun 5 has this problem.

If it were placed on a producer from an ordinary small company, such as the arrogant Yang Yuansheng, how could he control it? Starting a game is never something you can do just by patting your head.

This is a very complex and huge project. (To be continued...)