Auto Assault: Snipehunter Comments

In response to Scott "Scorch" Brown & Hermann Peterscheck's Post Mortem interview at OGDC '07, former lead content designer Adam "Snipehunter" Maxwell commented on his blog Dopass.com about Scorch's statement that "none of the devs played the game.":

What Scott was actually saying that not everyone played - "not everyone" is not "no one." I get why he said it - it was important that more of us played and it did no doubt hurt the game. The thing of it is... More than one of us was saying so the whole time, and a lot of the content designers were playing, all the time. Every day, every week. It was us content designers who suggested regular play times to force the rest of the team to play, whether they felt they wanted to or not. Our thinking was that if they did, they'd see what we saw and would be less likely to discount our and the community's suggestions to make the game broader and deeper and to make the core game loop significantly more interesting. It didn't work and I totally don't fault the team for that at all - our team was simply too small and our schedule too compressed for many folks to actually even have time to play, at all. The content designers played all the time, but to be fair maybe that's because we had to - we had to make sure our stuff was working (or as close to working as we could get until code bugs were addressed, in some sad cases) before we could submit it to QA. I do know that I was not the only designer to have more than one capped character, however... and you didn't need to have done that to have tested your individual work (you could have just force-leveled a character to the level needed to test your work). So while Scorch's point is valid (more of us should have been playing), the words he used are patently untrue.

It's just irritating that he wasn't clear about that, because now I see people on tons of forums across the net using that statement to knock ND's effort and to discount everything that was done. I also would have preferred that he explained that there was one person on the team who's entire job was to play through the game and review the design work from a "it's my job to ensure the game is fun" standpoint... and that that person was not one of those who was shouting loud and vehemently that the game wasn't fun enough.

I don't mention that to point fingers of blame here or anything like that all, I'm just pointing out that despite the way Scorch said it, there were people on the team playing the game, just not enough... and that even those that did play had differing opinions about what was wrong, so it's not entirely reasonable to say that the game would have improved drastically had more people on the team been playing. At best, the only thing you could say with certainty was that suggested ways to improve the game might have garnered more support from the team, had more of the team been playing regularly.

He could have said it better, is all. ;)

- Snipehunter