Former SH5 Producer Alexandru Gris talks about Software-Quality
 

Former SH5 Producer "Alexandru Gris" writes on his blog about Software-Quality: ;)

Software-Quality (1)
Software-Quality (2)
Software-Quality (3)

Very thoughtful posts, but it does make me wonder what the underlying conclusion about his own experience with SH5 is. I mean, it's pretty darn clear that somewhere along the lines, despite both experience and good thinking by the developers, something went very wrong with the project. The quality level we'd expect (especially given his obvious understanding of the notion of software quality) just didn't come together. So what did go wrong and why? Hmm :hmmm:

Perhaps these findings are the summary/results of the project.
For SH5 they come unfortunately too late.:shifty:

Yeah. I get the impression that on the development side, the problem could basically be summed up as feature creep at the expense of core focus and quality. Underlying that is the conflicting demands for both new in-depth 'die hard' features and features that appealed to a broader market. The development got too ambitious and started going in too many directions at once, losing focus and sacrificing quality when deadlines started pushing. It's a trap that many game projects, and not just in simulations, have fallen victim to, and I guess for SH5 that's most unfortunate...

One can have a standard they believe in.
Be it Software, Construction, or what have you.
If one works for someone else who signs the pay checks?
You do what you are told and damned your ideals unless you go elsewhere.

If higher ups demanded release of SH5 as it was released?
What could any of the Dev's have done?
Find a new job?
(Which would not have stopped release)

If jobs for them were that easy to come by I'm pretty sure they would have moved on.

We all sell our souls for the all mighty dollar at times.
And right now?
Times are tougher then in the past few years.
I know this for a fact being self employed in the Construction business.

I had to layoff all my Guys and desolve my business.
:nope:
I now work for someone else until things pick up.
I don't agree with him all the time on somethings.
But he writes my check so I do what he wants.

An important point: (I paraphrase) Self discipline exercised by all members of the project is necessary for quality.

This concept goes beyond software development. It's the foundation of all consistently successful ventures undertaken by humanity. If we are committed not only to the goal as a concept, but also to honing the necessary skills and mental sharpness to actually realize it, then the results speak for themselves. Teams that either don't understand the importance of, or are to lazy to pursue self discipline are doomed to achieve mediocrity at best.

This is when young people without any serious practical background are assigned to big projects. They are good in theory and speeches, but mediocre in the practical field. The end result: SH5.

What is going on in the SH5 moding section is not moding by any means, but a serious repair shop where people spend a lot of their lifetime working free to try fixing a game that was sold on the international market as a finished product. Every [REL] start with "this a fix for... ". Is just 2 bad that we don't have a lawyer among us, so he can sum up all these critical errors in the code and game design and sue Ubi. I seriously hope this was last time when Ubi makes a sim, as it was last time when I bought one of their products.

Yes, I recall Elenaiba hinted in a post towards that direction.

But it is probably a very difficult balance to strike between ambitiousness, novelty, and focus on old core game concepts. If you focus too much on getting the "old core" right, and update basically only a very few features like the outward appearance, then you basically only recreated an old game, and will likely not sell a lot (unless the predecessor is 20 years old).

If you become too ambitious and try to go well beyond the previous technological stage, you run the risks mentioned above. You'll need a lot of standing power and investment to pull ambitious projects off, and a lot of time (I get the impression Oleg just pulls that off with the new BoB).

If I compare games in the past 3-5 years to most typical games in the 90s, like TF1942, Silent Hunter 2, Gunship 2000, Pacific War, etc., then I find that many games roughly starting with the generation Falcon 4.0/Flashpoint/Silent Hunter II have evolved into such complex simulations, that topping that is hard. Especially if companies like Ubi decide on a strategy with more frequent releases of a franchise.

If less frequent, you could sell a new "Silent Hunter" (III) just with updated new flashy graphics maybe every 7 years. And even that will be hard since I find graphics sort of have converged, I can hardly see the tiny different between SHIV and SHV, nor would I care in a simulation about minuscule eye-candy differences. But coming up with new features and functionality at a higher frequency in such complex games like the SH series, War in the Pacific (AE) or anything close to that level, is going to be more and more investment and time intensive. I suppose we are up for some stagnation with hard-core simulations and "superdetailed" games in particular, since there seems to be a discrepancy: obviously it will be hard to get a pay back with a small customer ship but high release frequency for high investment costs.

I think SHV was one of victims of Ubi's new strategy. High release frequency, and limiting time and investment with such an ambitious project cannot go along very well -- and being less ambitious doesn't move it very far either, and will with the 5th title in a series (yawn...) not gain you too many new sales.

From what I gather from the posts, feature creep was more of a symptom. The real problem was losing track of actual quality; they believed they had a higher quality than they did. So they started building on this (believed) stable core, only to find out at the end the quality was lacking.

Imho at that point they should have decided to delay the release, but that didn't happen. :hmmm:

Slightly off topic, but along the lines of the above, and kind of reminiscent of the SHV drama. Almost funny to see such a repeat by a different company.

Just out of curiosity I read a review article about the new Mafia II. Off genre, but obviously the tenor could have been "copied" from SHV. Lack of features and functionality, linearity of story, poor physics simulation and purely optical damage model for cars, incomplete character development and empty cities,... sounds like another overly ambitious project that matches the above discussion.
Now it is no longer surprising that they did not widely distribute the game for previews before release... Which per se is already a huge stop sign.

I get the impression that the games, to evolve much further without only touching up the graphics (and pretty alone appears to be insufficient to make people happy), will in the future need much more time and resources. To make that happen, companies need to either accept reduced margins (and if you look in Ubi's last three or four yearly sales reports, there is a lot of earning that might better be turned into game development funds rather than dividends...), or increase the price. I assume most of us would be willing to pay 30-50% more, if, but only if, the quality and novelty criteria are truly met.

No need to increase the price, they just need to stop spending so much time in making it pretty and instead nail down content and gameplay first.


... Yeah, wishfull thinking. If it ain't pretty, it can't compete. :-?

Happens more and more often too; Stardock has a little controversy on their hands as well at the moment:
Stardock In “Unfinished” Game Drama
Wardell On “Unfinished” Controversy

You speak from my heart. I won't buy a game just for graphics improvements, unless it's "predecessor" is clearly several generations older. Gaming is much more "mental" to me than "optical". Pretty, yes, a game can be, but it needn't. First of all it needs to be detailed, accurate (physically, historically etc), well modeled and executed, and offer many option/decisions to explore and test historical and alternative outcomes.

I think the problem with SH5 is that the publisher allocated insufficient development time, and compounded the issue by making a business decision to give the game more of an 'arcade' feel to enhance the visuals for the casual gamers they hoped to attract.

Therefore, what we got was an unfinished, buggy mess that angered many subsimmers and was of little interest to the casual gamers.

According to Alexandru's CV, first year of SH5 development was March 2007 - Dec 2008

I liked his footnote on page 1:
** Management of expectations and of communities is more important than ever in the days of the Internet.

How many developers and publishers still fall foul of this?