ShockingAlberto
Member
Couldn't fit it in the thread title, but the story also reveals Eternal Darkness 2 was in development.
http://kotaku.com/5955223/what-went-wrong-with-silicon-knights-x+men-destiny
This is a really good piece of game journalism on Kotaku's part that confirms much of what I have heard (and relayed) about Silicon Knights in the last two years. Read the whole article, but here's some choice quotes.
Fascinating stuff and kudos to Kotaku on the article.
http://kotaku.com/5955223/what-went-wrong-with-silicon-knights-x+men-destiny
This is a really good piece of game journalism on Kotaku's part that confirms much of what I have heard (and relayed) about Silicon Knights in the last two years. Read the whole article, but here's some choice quotes.
But the former employees I spoke with painted a very different picture: an environment in which one man wields absolute power over everything that went on within the studio's four walls. One source described SK president Denis Dyack as a man who has "repeatedly stated to the company that artists are ‘a dime a dozen' and can be replaced." The same source described Dyack as a man who "proudly smiles in staff meetings and describes his role as a ‘benevolent dictatorship.'... Dyack is SK; SK is Dyack. They are one and the same — a single unchanging entity."
"I distinctly remember a theater review of the ‘Chinatown' level, which was so broken that it was completely unnavigable, even by the lead designer playing it," a source says. "Dyack's only note was that the ‘lights should be more red.' In another instance, he thought the final boss fight should be interrupted by ‘a challenge room'—his favourite thing from Too Human."
This command structure wasn't always such a fatal flaw, former employees said. Before Silicon Knights cut ties with Japanese powerhouse Nintendo following the 2004 release of Twin Snakes, the studio had crucial outside help for game quality, design and process. "This is the reason for the extremely high quality games that SK built a reputation on," says one source. "Nintendo was going to put their name on the game, so it had to be 'Nintendo quality.'"
Silicon Knights' post-Nintendo releases certainly took a dive in quality, based on the low Metacritic scores for Too Human and X-Men: Destiny, so this theory seems plausible. "Once [Nintendo] were out of the picture, SK could do whatever they wanted," a source says. "Denis believed that SK was finally out from under the oppressive nature of Nintendo as a publisher. Once Denis was given more freedom, things started to fall apart."
Next, according to sources, comes the request from SK that it requires additional time to complete the project. "We aren't talking a couple of months of full production here," the same source says. "We are talking six to 12 months; almost always 12 months. This basically blows out the budget for the game by an additional 35 percent or so. You can imagine the reaction this got from the financial guys doing projections over at Activision."
For some former employees, it became "a bit of a sick game" to come into work each Monday and see how many more people had resigned. "At one point there was a collection of name plates in the art department that were taped to a drawing of a tree," recalls one. "It was growing with every resignation. Denis was extremely pissed when he saw it after a few weeks, but most people saw it as a remembrance of colleagues who had moved on and would be missed. We were losing people like crazy. The first people to go were some of the strongest, longest-standing employees at SK." These are people with "lead" and "director" in their titles.
The answer is far more exciting: Eternal Darkness 2, which Kotaku can reveal that SK was working on in parallel to the Activision contract.
"SK didn't take the development of XMD seriously the entire time I was there," a source says. "They were working on an Eternal Darkness 2 demo that they could take to publishers. While I was there, they were even siphoning off staff from my [XMD] team to work on it." Sources allege that many of SK's programmers, artists and designers were not contributing to the final quality of XMD at all—at least, not in the first year of the game's development. "I was always complaining to the producers about this, as the numbers never worked out," the same source says. "Denis is not an X-Men fan either, so he didn't care much for the license. To him, it seemed more like a job to get us by, until ED2 could be developed and sold to a publisher—which never happened."
Yet despite this reportedly split effort, the ED2 demo also failed to come together in a satisfying way, sources said. "The farthest they got with it when I left SK was, literally, one two-level church interior," says one former employee. "It was really bad, as I recall. It took the side-team a long time to even get that far. Bad tech, combined with a team composed of people who had not shipped a title since Metal Gear really hurt that demo. Other than that, I can't explain why things went so poorly for them [except that] a lot of key people responsible for the original Eternal Darkness are long gone."
Fascinating stuff and kudos to Kotaku on the article.