Where is Development Hell?

 It lies in you and it lies in me!

We talk so often about this mythical space between land or sky, or perhaps land and that burning molten core of our earth, within which stunted development rules supreme. A place that game development slips into wherein no one escape unscathed, and where a simple genre game can balloon into hundreds and even thousands of hours more than it was originally supposed to take to make. You think that a game which takes around 10 years longer to make than you'd expect must be polished to a mirror gleam powerful enough to blind pilots in space, right? Not really, being stuck in Development Hell is typically an example of wayward management, iffy planning, shifting goalposts and/or fundamental concept shifts, all of which leads to crucial work being repeatedly chucked out, to devastating effect on everyone's personal progress. Development Hell is the death of efficiency and the death of ultimate fine tuned perfectionism. And it's becoming more prevalent as the industry grows.

I think back in the day the games industry was much more familiar with the basic idea of pitching a game concept, starting the work and then figuring out the whole process wasn't working and cancelling the thing. Heck, that's how we got famous vaporware stories like 'Starcraft Ghost', 'Battlefront 3', 'Agent' and 'Star Wars: 1313'. (Actually, that last one was cruelly killed by Disney after they gutted Lucas. The studio, not the man. They'd save him for seconds.) Whether it was due to the more prevalent presence of clueless venture capitalists driven by the 'young investor' motto of "Keep sinking money and you'll get returns one day." or simply how much cheaper it was to maintain development windows back before every studio was 400 bodies too large. Remember, nowadays you can somehow sink 100 million into creating something as milquetoast and drab as the Saints Row Reboot. How? God knows, but that ain't the sort of costs one shakes a stick at.

My theory is that as games have taken more and more resources to develop, both in manpower and funding, it's become harder and harder for the people pulling the purse strings to admit when it's all heading nowhere fast. With the typical sunk cost fallacy of any gambler settling in, they start to figure that if they pull out now then all that money which has already been spent has been totally wasted, but if only they put their head back on the tables and ride the dip that theoretical shot-caller can make it all the way back around, stick out the choppy waves and sail it to smooth waters and recovered losses. So the money keeps rolling on, the ugly development practises, bad teams, unproductive work cycles, just keep piling ontop one another and the resulting projects ultimately end up draining more and more life out of the studio, the staff and eventually the product on the other end. Usually proving more disastrous than it would have if a component leader had just stepped up and pulled the plug off rip.

Of course there can sometimes be other major factors in play. Anyone who's sat around scratching their heads as to why it is Ubisoft have been insisting on bringing out this 'Skull & Bones' for close to 10 years now; the answer is probably because they actually can't kill it off. The game was spurred on by a development grant from Singapore, and if I know Ubisoft I'm guessing that's a grant the company has already spent and aren't really in the financial position to refund. (Especially not after the recent couple of years they've had.) I'm going to be charitable and assume that all those development dollars went into the game they were supposed to. (And, in doing so, assume this isn't a 'Randy Pitchford funnelling funds meant for Colonial Marines into Borderlands' situation. Allegedly.) They have to bring out this game sooner or later, and take the reputational hit when it's dead in under a year just like their other similar titles because this game was built and geared for an industry that has evolved 10 years past where this project was when it started. Such is the toil and cost of the Development Hell.

I've found myself thinking of this most cursed of holes due simply to the situation surrounding a game that I was actually following for a time: Beyond Good and Evil 2. Wait- no, not that Beyond Good and Evil 2: the one which existed as nothing more than a CGI movie of Jade jumping through some desert buildings. I'm talking about the other Beyond Good and Evil 2. The one that existed purely as a CGI movie of a foul mouthed monkey... no, actually we did get some scant snippets of early alpha (or let's be honest, pre-alpha) gameplay over the many years since this second iteration of the game has been announced. But it seems that every year we ended up hearing less and less about the updates surrounding the game, until we reached the point we're at now where Ubisoft simply assures us that it hasn't been cancelled and tells us to go away.

It's actually quite an interesting little loop hole they're exploiting to get around fan disappointment, because Beyond Good and Evil 2 was, in fact, cancelled a very long time ago. That original version of the game not only changed in narrative drastically (from a sequel to a prequel) but in fundamental genre. (From a single-player action platformer to a Live-service style multiplayer hybrid thing.) By attempting to cajole the fans with the false promise that this current project is the same they were getting excited over back in 2008, Ubisoft have sacrificed their own dignity in technically making BGE2 the longest game in official development by a team of supposedly competent professionals. And if the habits established and reinforced by all the Development Hell denizens of times gone has taught us anything; it's to be more wary of a game the longer it languishes in that slip-space.

All the hallmarks of games developed long past a sensible timeframe are there in the pudding; the game is developing for a trend that has died down (live service titles are dropping like flies). The early game marketers went around boasting technology that sounded space age when we heard about it- an entire solar system rendered in-engine- but now we've got No Man's Sky which rendered about a dozen galaxies in it's game. Only really the genuinely gorgeous visual style of the world those initial trailers proposed remains, and that unique culture-smashing art style is inherent to the Beyond Good and Evil franchise as a whole, it's what made the first game's world so striking and memorable. But is that enough to ensure the game isn't going to be a stretched-out, uneven, years-too-late mess if it ever comes out? Who can say...

What makes the Development Hell so insidious, is that it's everywhere. Anyone who has ever sat down to pursue any sort of artistic endeavour has felt it's fingers creeping up their back as they work, slipping it's way around their throat. It's waits in every procrastination, every erased line, every break- threatening to curse those of us doomed to ever seek an untouchable 'perfection'. But try to run from it, never take your foot off the pedal, that in itself presents the cruel prospective of an inevitable crash at some point. It's a dance of mediation, managing a project or just managing yourself with that project- knowing when to start and most importantly, the thing the world seems to be somewhat forgetting, when to stop. Remember, even in the worst case scenario where everything has led off a bridge and the whole project needs to be scrapped- you are a better artist for having gone down that road to begin with, and can take those skills to the next empty page you work.

What is up with Beyond Good and Evil 2?

 Beyond a joke at this point.

Maybe I just hit my head and the dizzied fragments of my concussion have been conjuring misremembered phantoms for me, indicative of some real troubling brain damage, or Beyond Good and Evil 2 was indeed, announced a while back and is still in development limbo. In fact, let me look it up quickly- Yep, guess my brain is still working, this title was announced back in- oh my god, 2008? Is it ever going to launch? Nah, I'm messing with yah. There was indeed a BGE2 announced back in 08, but that version of the project was quietly cancelled. Still, we've been waiting on this new-and-improved BGE 2 (which is actually a prequel to BGE 1, but let's not split hairs) for about 5 years now and although I'm not one to sit there tapping my watch when it comes to videogame development, I'm going to make an exception here: What the hell are any of those guys even doing? I mean seriously, we've had a whole new console generation pop up in the time since the 2017 announcement and now, with not even a single polished gameplay demo to show for it!

And to be clear, I'm not someone deeply in love with the 'exciting prospect' of a new Beyond Good and Evil game. I know the original is a cult classic, and I see it as an exceptionally fun 'Dreamworks/Miyazaki to Disney'-equivalent game for it's time, but I wouldn't be calling out any great injustice if the franchise was literally never picked up again. I didn't care much for the story, and the world might very well be best in the tiny dose of it that we were fed, who's to say. That being said, I'm not remotely against seeing any more of Jade and her adventures either. That world really was really bubbling with character and personality that almost felt like their own take on Outer Rim Star Wars at times, only with more thematic consistency. Some of the missions were pretty fun with cool and unique environments to explore, and the combat system was... well the combat was as good as you could expect for 2003 but I wasn't personally in love with it. There is potential with a sequel to really strive out and become a dose of fresh air to the gaming world, and Ubisoft really does need a fresh new idea that isn't a bullet in the foot of their own public reputation. (Despite how much I know they love their Crypto duties.) 

So then the question is: where is that sequel? In any form? At the time of the announcement, Ubisoft and the developers on this product in particular spoke a big game about creating a title that was going to revolutionise action adventure as we know it. A huge playspace that would encompass an entire foreign solar system, impeccably designed sci-fi cities just dripping with cultural influences and a procedurally evolving world that would be updated with seasonal content so that the game was forever offering new activities! Okay, so that last bit wasn't actually all that exciting and really just sounded like a Live Service, like it inevitable was going to be. (and which we've kind of seen reflected in other flagship Ubisoft series' since) but all that stuff about scale was mindblowing. Being able to fly your tiny ship into a huge flagship and jump from planet to planet? That's Star Citizen Territory! And maybe that comparison is less surface level than I originally believed because neither game displays any hope of being completed within the next decade.

There was even the Space Monkey Program, who remembers that? It was a emailing list that one could sign up to in order to be kept up to date on the progress of the project, and one which I don't believe has been updates since late 2019. That was where we were gifted some of those lingering snippets of rough-looking pre-alpha gameplay you might find floating around, all of which are excessively experimental but benefit from bubbly and passionate sounding team members cheering it's praises and promising us that something special awaits these gameplay chunks once the polish has been applied. And then they went dark, out of the blue, and we haven't heard a thing since. This is the kind of treatment you'd expect from a Kickstarter game with devs who have wholly jumped ship, not a division of the incredibly successful Ubisoft company- Where is all of that communication which the community was promised?

Well believe it or not, we have actually heard a mention of the game somewhat recently, (half a year back) curtsey of 'sentient chunk of lint-roller fluff', Yves Guillemot. Realising the monumental amount of angst shared by a community desperate for substantive news, he rose from his high castle, donned his finest BS tone and rolled up upon an earnings call with this diamond morsel to throw to us savages. "It's coming along quite well." Oh- is that it? two and a half years since we've heard a whisper of a murmur and all we're given is 'Yeah it's cool, stop asking'. I don't know if it's sensible for me to feel as insulted as I do by that. But similarly I can't really help myself, now can I? Yves: Ubisoft is not 'going well'; your business both inside, with the rampant abuse allegations warding away clients, and out, with your reputation among the wider community being similarly torpedoed, is not 'going well'; so how about you give us something with a bit for value to it concerning BGE2? So that we can see for ourselves just exactly what is, and what isn't, 'going well'.

What's more, why is Yves talking for this game on the developer's behalf? Wasn't one of the draws of the Space Monkey program being that the active team would be communicating with the consumers, safe from the corporate-buzzword filter of stuffy management types? Yet now we've got Yves as our sole spokesperson, undermining any progress or complications befalling the project with his handwaving platitude remark? You can't just feed crap to us in desperate hope that we'll just nod our heads and go 'that sounds about right' without looking any deeper ourselves. It's like a father going to school before prom and telling everyone exactly why they should invite his daughter; it's embarrassing and rank. (Don't think too hard about that metaphor, I really wanted to make it.)

The only other significant event to happen during the breadth of Beyond Good and Evil 2's life cycle is the exorcising of the game's director Michel Ancel. Yes, he departed the company during the wave of Ubisoft departures, and a French Newspaper who were following the developments of the company have attested that his leadership might have caused a lot of the problems with the development. With him allegedly being abusive and disorganised, thus leading to an unfocused vision for the game, so that it had to be rebooted several times over. So with him out of the way does that finally mean that BGE 2 is on track? Of course not, that just means even more delay as the project had to switch hands and maybe even some plan rearrangements because this game apparently wants to rival 'Duke Nukem Forever' in development hell miles. 

Despite all the misgivings that hound this game I remain confidant that it will someday come out. Will it be the same game that we were advertised back in 2017? No. Will it resemble that vision close enough that we can squint and pretend it's the same game? Possibly. Ubisoft has hit several nerves in recent years so it's essential for their own sake that they portray competence in making games, if not in supporting them, so I'd imagine that marketing will try hard to downplay the many shuffles around the game. My prediction: This year we're going to get another tease, maybe a whole new trailer, but it won't come with any gameplay, promises and certainly not a release window. And thus we will start this whole waltz with the void as we play the 'has it been cancelled yet' game once more. Welcome to the uncertainty train, BGE2, take a seat right next to VTMB2; we'll see to you in a bit.

Are Ubisoft finally changing things up?

Only now, at the end, do you understand.

Oh, the sweet sound of being right about a topic for a change; could there be anything so devilishly piquant? For years now it feels like I've been in the absolute lowest minority when it comes to calling out Ubisoft for being the idea-bankrupt hacks they are. (Or rather, that the Ubisoft A-team are. The B-Teams put together some cool games every once and a while.) Time and time again our argument was met that those who enjoyed lapping up the same game year upon year, as though these people loved the prospect of signing up to the industry's highest-bar season pass. In their defence, however, there was quite a lot of hyperbole from our side of the argument, but it didn't change the fact that Ubisoft reveled in their mediocrity to such a degree that Yves Guillemot offered a complimentary backhand to 'Breath of the Wild', claiming they did nothing new and just copied Ubisoft's formula, albeit to a flawless execution. (I love you, Yves, but that's some bull and you know it.)

But all this outrage and finger pointing can finally rest now that we have an admission of defeat on Ubisoft's end. For, you see, not too long ago it became public knowledge, as reported by Polygon, that Ubisoft are on the road to restructuring their editorial team going forward. A change, it would seem, brought about due to the similarities between 'Ghost Recon Breakpoint' and 'The Division 2'. (Something which seems to have cost both games dearly in terms of sales.) Of course, that isn't the only problem that those two games, or more the former game, suffered from; but it was a huge source of public and critical backlash throughout the launch period of those games.

'Ghost Recon: Wildlands', the game which bought the 'Ghost Recon' brand into the modern world of oversized open-worlds, was an action stealth game wherein all that players had to actively worry about was the state of their ammo pouch. 'Breakpoint' decided to 'shake up' this system by throwing in a pointless RPG system that would require players to constantly cycle out 'underleveled' guns and switch them for new guns as well as breaking down items for materials that would then be crafted into new guns and- God it all just makes me want to tear my hair out! Oh, and I did I say this system was 'pointless'? Sorry, I misspoke. What I meant to say was, this system did nothing to add value to the formula, rather just provided an excuse to ramp up monetisation to a 'pay-to-win' degree wherein the team could charge for anything from raw material to cool customization pieces to skill points. (Oh wait, sorry they're called: 'time savers'.) Seems most people weren't dense enough to fall for any of that, because mass audiences dropped 'Breakpoint' like a brick and here Ubisoft is, trying to recover from the backlash.

As for The Division 2, I can't speak from first-hand experience for it's troubles, actually from what I've heard on an anecdotal level, folk seem to like it. If I were to guess, that game's greatest failings may have been due to the fact that 'Breakpoint' worked to poach it's sales with a ludicrously similar premise, which would explain why Ubisoft have finally woken up to the fact that their systems need a significant change. As Polygon reports it, Ubisoft CEO has blamed the lackluster sales of both those titles (Which, remember, both hailed from the storied 'Tom Clancy' brand, and so should have been easy sellers) on "a lack of differentiation in consumers' minds". Now, ignoring the fact that he just called us all stupid, it does make sense, in a twisted way, that fans will grow tired with a game developer who puts out essentially the same product every year. (Unless you're a sports fan. They live off that repetition.) In today's age there are a plethora of other exciting titles all vying for attention of fans and all offering something wild, new and attention grabbing. If Ubisoft can't remain competitive in that market, it's only fair that they get left behind in the dust.

In regards to the actual steps being taken, we won't be seeing a complete reshuffle of the company's ranks, but more of a light overhual. To that end, Ubisoft's chief creative Officer, Serge Hascoet, won't be moving from his cushy seat as head of the editorial group, (You know, despite his failure to encourage creativity.) but instead he'll be given more subordinates with more autonomy of their own. Oh, add more rungs on the ladder... that'll help communication. According to the report, this will help Ubisoft's flagship franchises like Assassin's Creed, Watch Dogs and For Honor, feel more distinct. Woah, hold up... 'For Honor'? That title has one game which barely scrapes into the most played online games list even at peak times, how does that even count as a franchise let alone flagship? (Don't get me wrong, I would very much like a sequel to come out and fix all of the problems of the first game but we don't yet live in that world.)

Allegedly, and I can't stress how alleged this is, the previous system of rule over at Ubisoft often meant that tastes and opinions of one or two important folk in the editorial team often managed to work it's way into the games themselves. And that just makes sense, doesn't it? That's why, after Watch Dogs 2 introduced a drone for spotting enemies, that same drone found it's way into the Division, Ghost Recon Wildlands and 'Assassin's Creed Origins'. (Through means of 'recon eagle') Way to take a fad and push it to it's absolute extreme, guys, you're doing gods work in making every single game feel the same and uninspired.

Of course, that isn't the only factor contributing to the 'samey-ness' of all these titles. As the Polygon article pointed out, Ubisoft have officially geared their company more towards open world titles that all have some sort of live service angle to them of late, meaning that every single pitch meeting for these titles have the exact same whiteboard set-up. ("Here is the circle for the recurrency loops and here is the level-gating to force players to spend money.") Guillemot believes that their upcoming games could suffer from the same lack of diversity that harmed the Tom Clancy titles. And that's likely why we haven't heard a peep out of 'Watch Dogs: Legion' since it's recent delay.

Ultimately, will this save Ubisoft games and make them more of a contender on the AAA stage, likely not, but this may work to halt their decline for the time being. Fans are just starting to realize how Ubisoft are half-arsing their creative process, and taking active steps to obfuscate that might just placate the immediate problem. I fear the real issue with Ubisoft titles are more deeply ingrained, however, and lie at the heart of the franchises themselves. Or should I say, lack thereof. Take a look at their most well known flagship, Assassin's Creed, and how pitiful it's storyline has been ever since the 3rd game; at this point there is not point getting these games to continue the story and reconnect with favourite characters, just to go sight seeing in whatever time period Ubisoft has picked next. Or how about the upcoming 'Beyond Good and Evil 2' which plans to divorce fans from their hero main character and have them take over some lifeless 'make you own character' avatar. (Showing that folks don't realize that is was the heart of BGE that made it so memorable.)

Maybe given time and enough effort, Ubisoft can start to reform this franchises into something as epic as they rightly should be. There's no reason why 'Assassin's Creed' shouldn't be as much of a landmark event as a new 'Final Fantasy', all it will take is time, talent and a bevy of creativity. For one, they could start by finally mixing Assassin's Creed and Watch Dogs into one mega franchise before fans get bored of speculating about when that's going to happen. Or they could just shift gears and start making brand new franchises from the ground up. (I'm throwing ideas at Ubisoft for free. Anymore are going to cost you, Yves.) Unfortunately, it's going to be a number of years before we see these policies have any serious effect on Ubisoft games, and we can only hope that the company haven't sunk into irrelevancy in that time. That's probably unlikely, but the gaming world does tend to move faster than any other medium (afterall, look what happened to Bethesda) so you never rightly know.