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The Crimson Dragon talk got me thinking (and my head hurts).
What are some examples of games that when previewed before launch and weren't very good came to be quite decent indeed upon release?
I can name a boat load of games that were crap, met with delay after delay, and when inevitably released, were still crap. But not too many come to mind that actually improved drastically from the preview to the release stage.
LIST TIME!!!!~~~1!
Metal Gear Rising debuted and then stalled because the team had no idea what to do with the cutting mechanic, whereupon it entered development hell. It was then cancelled as they also found the combat to be too dull, and talks began of farming it out to a random company to see if anyone else could do anything with it. Kojima wanted to stick with Japanese companies and they ended up going with Platinum, who asked for more freedom and basically completely overhauled everything including tossing out most of the stealth mechanics and redoing the cutting system. We then ended up with something that was completely fuckawesome.
Demon's Souls, apparently:
Quote:
In a candid interview with Game Informer the Sony exec agreed that passing on Demon's Souls was one of Sony's biggest errors in software publishing this generation.
He went on to explain the rationale behind the decision, offering a breakdown of the 'horizontal' development system in Japan, which he says resulted in the game being misjudged.
"The game development in Japan typically is made horizontally where all assets are made in parallel, so it's difficult to figure out what the final state of the game is going to be," he said.
"The western style game development is typically a vertical slice. So in the very early process, the team tried to create a small piece of the experience that resembles the final product. What happened with Demon's Souls was until very late in the game's development, we were not able to play the game through."
According to Yoshida, Sony sampled the game at a time when it was technically unstable, and his own negative experiences coloured the decision making process.
"There were framerate issues and the network was not up and running. We underestimated the quality of the game and to be honest, the media in Japan did the same.
"For my personal experience with Demon's Souls, when it was close to final I spent close to two hours playing it and after two hours I was still standing at the beginning at the game. I said, 'This is crap. This is an unbelievably bad game.' So I put it aside."
I had a friend who went to E3 in 2001. Played Halo and said it was the biggest pile, ran poorly, looked bad, etc. Obviously they figured it out by launch. From that and what I have read elsewhere, a lot of launch titles really do come together at the last second.
Conker's Bad Fur Day started off as a Banjo Kazooie/ Donkey kong 64 clone, then they got darker and added in war mode. It was a victory for Rare
what did they win
They got to throw countless copies of that game into the garbage because nobody wanted it and now it sells for stupid prices.
Perfect Dark also got delayed a ton and ended up being awesome. That seemed to be a habit with RARE games back then.
Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 4 were the first games that came to my mind, though.
Joust - Rare was offered a shitload of $$$ by this little company called Microsoft - maybe you've heard of them?
Mzo - Conker was always a great game, you just had to be in the know
Conker was a great game, I agree.
Rare would have gotten that money with or without Conker
True. Microsoft did request a Conker remake almost immediately after that deal was closed though. Conker Live & Reloaded was one of Rare's first projects for M$