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Now we have 2 absolutely baseless assumptions.
You believe a 25 hour game should take, at minimum, one year longer to develop than it was originally supposed to.
Opinion noted.
Why not?
Paradox clearly thought the game should be finished by the end of this year. Paradox clearly would've taken Covid into consideration as a plausible excuse. Paradox clearly did not consider it a plausible excuse.
That Paradox took the extreme measure of firing the two people most culpable for what can only be described as narrative bloat, shows precisely what their expectations were for the timeline of this game's development.
So Paradox first thought March 2020 was doable, and it wasn't; then they gave an extension all the way to the end of 2020; but that too proved insufficient. They evidently weren't willing to hear any more excuses for a 25 hour game taking this long to finish. It's clear that the figurative sh** hit the fan when they finally realized the game's development would go well into 2021.
But you, you believe a 25 hour game certainly can and should take this long. So you must know your stuff better than Paradox.
What I am saying is that 5 years for a big non formulaic game doesn't seem excessive, even less so if they want it to be great.
And game quality is going to be affected, it will be a horrible frankestein of genres that bloodlines1 fans will not like.
Maybe someone who has not played bloodlines1 likes it.
Here is an opinion from a video game developer on this matter, you both have some points in common.
Jorge Peligro Veloso:
"On the recent "organizational changes" from the perspective of a game developer with 8 years in the industry:
First of all, I don't work for any of the companies involved and I'm just talking from my experience with this exact pattern of company behavior. I aim to provide a bit of insight of what these changes could mean for both the game, the studio behind it and future installments. And why even if the game ends up well, we should still unite to boycott this decision.
One crucial thing to understand is how team cohesion works:
6 recently acquainted veterans can take longer to make the same game than 6 less experienced people who have worked together for a year.
This is because creativity needs experimentation, and experimentation introduces a lot of unpredictability that can only be sorted out by getting to know each member's individual ways of working. New teams will have a tendency to be unpredictable at first, then start to develop their own team cohesion. Kind of what happens at high level soccer teams.
Even though Hardsuit Labs had already developed previous games, the team behind Blodlines 2 was newly assembled. Despite that, they put a lot of effort to introduce as much creativity and experiment stuff for Bloodlines 2, which led to unpredictable timeframes. Thinblood abilities were restricted, then made accessible, facial animations had to be revamped and combat was probably done over a thousand times.
The cost of experimentation was the release date. And this meant Hardsuit Labs had to sink more money to satisfy and correct the creative vision of the team. At one point, Paradox/Hardsuit had to stop these delays, as they were getting a bit out of hand.
So far, so good. However, the way they decided to do it is where things get REALLY ugly.
Executives could have talked with Mitsoda and Cluney and asked them to appoint an outside consultant with more production experience to help get the game released and assist them in solidifying their own team cohesion. The results would have been the same for the game, and the studio could have benefited a LOT from being able to choose their own production mentor.
But this was not the case. Instead of viewing the studio as a growing team and trying to find ways to help them become the best they could be, they decided they were a problem to be dealt with.
Thus, without notice, they fired the ones they deemed problematic, and the executives decided to appoint an external consultant based on their own criteria of how a team should work, without a single opinion from the team members.
This is the equivalent of parents having a teen with a passion for arts, who has been struggling with a couple of subjects. Then instead of finding a tutor to help them push through those subjects and become the best artist they could be, they decided to use that struggle as an excuse to get them out of the art academy and force them to become a doctor.
I've seen this happen multiple times in my career. I've seen producers, leads and creative directors demoted and replaced with external consultants and even the executives themselves. All of these ended with broken morale, reduced teamwork and, worst of all, fear of creativity.
So: Bloodlines 2 will not suffer much. The game is on its final stages of development. They're probably going to cut some corners and hard to implement/debug features to reach a more predictable release schedule.
However, if Paradox/Hardsuit Labs believe the success of the game was brought by these organizational changes, the team behind the game will probably be left with a crippled morale, and the terrible fear of creativity and experimentation, delegating all of those traits to the decisions of the new Creative Director, who has never in his life worked on a project even remotely similar to Bloodlines.
This how you suck the soul out of a team and how bad franchises are born. Just look at what happened to Assassin's Creed when they fired the leads to take the brand and make predictable 1 year production cycles.
So...what can we do about it?
We take refunds out of every pre-order, we remind them on every tweet they make, on their discord channel and even to them directly. Refunds will get noticed, especially if they pile up right after their announcement. If they retract or you still want to support the dev's work, you can buy it after release at the same price tag. But asking for refunds NOW is crucial.
This is not about how Bloodlines 2 will turn out, this is about what happens next. This is about the team's integrity, and this is about the man that worked tirelessly for years to make this happen."
I don't see where I'm fear-mongering here.
The game's badly delayed from its original timetable and marketing plan, that's a fact.
Paradox was evidently angry. Firing people usually is a result of extreme dissatisfaction, and not just mild disappointment. Again, fact.
Paradox likely considered their extension all the way through 2020 generous enough to compensate for Covid and any other delays.
If they didn't think HSL could finish the game by the end of 2020, why would they fire the people most responsible for failing to meet that deadline? Obviously they made an assumption (with money riding on that assumption) that the extension they gave was more than sufficient.
I'm detailing my reasoning here. All you're doing is saying, 'nah.'
I don't really care how long you think the game could/should have taken. I'm saying it's plain how long Paradox thought it should take, and it's plain they were not happy with the necessity of a second huge delay.
I think that's what a lot of people want.
I've seen more pictures of developer's cats than actual in game screen shots.
You always assume 'bad' stuff, that's why fear-mongering.
Yeah, they thought the game would have grown to the size of 25 hours by now, but this didn't happen so they had to take another year to make it 25, instead of 19 they have right now. This is my speculation.
They made some internal changes to make sure that [whatever] ... no, you automatically assume they made those changes to make the game worse, just bad and horrible.
It doesn't make sense yet you guys constantly come up with these ridiculous claims.
I feel as if you make assumptions without any indications for them, or even by ignoring statements to the contrary. Now to be clear, what i will write now will contain heresay, so here we go:
a) The Narrative team as claimed before that they were on time and more or less finished. Which goes partly against your 25+ hours claim and could point into a cost cutting decisions (which would align with the game being over budget).
b) All shown gameplay videos contained animations (especially in combat) not up to modern standards and rather clunky gameplay. Which makes it unlikely that the sole problem lay in someone just wanting to tell a bigger story than agreed upon.
c) Mandryka - his blog and his overall know body of work, seems rather gameplay focused and not especially focused on storytelling. And he'll be taking Cluneys role. We've no knowledge of anyone filling in for Brian -> So that looks rather like someone being brought in to bring gameplay back on track (specialist for that), than bring someone in to recut a story (no specialist for writing seeming to be added).
d) Brian and Cluney are presumably friends, meaning percived loyality and resistance towards someone external brought in could play a role. Making it again possible that Brian was percieved as a hurdle for someone taking over.
So to be honest i see a lot of possible reasons, even all 3 of them falling on the bad site because they would have wanted to keep Avellones additions to the game. Or some such.
But sure... one could assume what you do...
But it's all rather fishing in the dark without real informations.
Towards 25 hours gameplay - Gameplay time is a bad indicator of actual nessecary work. Or of how long it takes, as it's always bound to team size, actual gameplay loops and whatnot...
This is what happens when a project gets into issues, either due to economical, communication, project direction or delays. Those that have "responsibility" will always get axed, if they keep having delays, goes over budget or clearly goes against directions that were agreed upon..
The note itself with this being organisatorial changes, is a basic standard way of saying someone was fired (but in a somewhat friendly and respective mannor) I have been fired with the same reason.. in that case, it was because the part of the project I was doing (while being success for its segment) did not showcase any proper success in the field the project was designed to and was to complex (it was costly as well) Thus, a few of us got axed.
The one thing that is important in a project, is that nobody is so important that they can´t be replaced, because if you have one or more people that are vital, the project is way to unstable and will easily fail (when budgets are in the millions, this is no go)
There is no doubt, that this game has also been made much bigger than it was intended.. We should be happy that nothing happened earlier or that it could have turned into a "closed" project.. No we most likely get most of the story (with Brian´s take on it) but most likely a rushed ending. That is atleast better than nothing.
Those reactions have nothing to do with narrative development and everything to do with an inexperienced and evidently poorly managed studio.
Paradox should have pressured Kipling to resign.
It just seems like the studio isn't confident with their progress enough to show it off.They aren't a Triple A company that can leverage the quality of their game on past releases and merits because they haven't built any.
I have been following games of indie devs that have a greater sense of showing progress and posting status updates every few weeks than HSL. It's rather embarrassing at this point with a triple delay and no trailer or road map or screenshots. Just snapchat tier meme edits and cat photos.