While I don't understand why Spark keeps popping up everywhere like a cockroach, this was one of my favorite PS2 series, so I'd be interested in seeing how successful a reboot would be.Quote:
Originally Posted by Magic Box
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While I don't understand why Spark keeps popping up everywhere like a cockroach, this was one of my favorite PS2 series, so I'd be interested in seeing how successful a reboot would be.Quote:
Originally Posted by Magic Box
Once again, I am mystified asto why a Japanese publisher thinks a third-rate Western company should handle their franchises. Lost Planet 3 looks horrendous and, well, DmC...
I've never played an Onimusha, so I don't really care about this, but it's weird.
There seems to be tremendous pressure to cater to a western audience. I think most of us agree that many of the Japanese developers don't get it. So they first make the decision to outsource. Then, when you look at the good western developers - Bethesda, BioWare, CryTek, id, Irrational, Junction Point, Naughty Dog, Rockstar North, etc. - they are all spoken for by very large western publishers. The only Japanese publisher that has been successful in this thought process has been Square Enix, because they were smart enough to acquire Eidos and stay ahead of the curve on this trend while also keeping their Japanese and Western IPs separate.
Well, I don't agree with that.
I dunno, there are plenty of decent independent Western developers. Avalanche Studios, United Front Games (note that those two are responsible for two of the more significant games in S-E's Western oeuvre), Fatshark, Starbreeze, Gearbox, Double Fine, Piranha Bytes. The question is whether these developers would want to get involved in projects like this. For instance, Double Fine was burned heavily with Brutal Legend and they probably don't ever want to put that much investment and risk into a single major game again.
I do find it really weird that Spark Unlimited seems to be involved everywhere, given that they're a third-rate FPS developer, but maybe this is a GRIN-style play to reach the big leagues. And we all know how well that turned out...
Yeah, it seems like Japan is almost resigned to admit they don't get it, but they don't know where to turn.
I think the smart play would be to open up a new studio in a city with strong development -- Austin, San Fran, LA, Montreal, etc -- and get some high end talent and let them come up with something. They have the money to bring in quality developers, so why squander it on an independent studio that doesn't?
Probably the time and risk factors. I don't imagine they want to wait the five or so years it would take to start an AAA studio from scratch and get a single game out of them - not to mention the costs. It's much cheaper and, on paper, nearly as worthwhile, to just sign a deal with a cheap pre-existing Western studio. Sometimes this can turn out well! Look at Mercury Steam - they went from the godawful Jericho to the good Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. But I suspect that's the exception rather than the rule.
From that Inafune interview I linked in another thread:This probably has a lot to do with them hiring cheap Western developers. They want to outsource it to save money and gain a different perspective on their title, but they don't have many choices when it comes to other Japanese companies. Then you start to run into expression across different languages and cultural setups, like what he discusses later:Quote:
How do you select the developers that you work with?
KI: Well, I wanted to work with a Japanese developer at first, since I figured it'd be tough to set everything up to work with overseas developers from the get-go. So, looking at Japanese outfits, there are really a limited number of developers that can deploy a hundred or two hundred people together to work on a project. Marvelous was one of them, and among the choices at hand, I found them one of the easiest to work with. They were eager to work with me, too, in assorted meanings of the term, so it was really a stroke of luck that it worked out.
There aren't that many big independent studios in Japan. Can you talk about why?
KI: Even what independent developers there are here essentially follow orders from their client publishers. There really aren't a lot of rights given to them. As a result, you don't really see companies on the orders of hundreds of employees that try to make a name for themselves via making good products.
With outfits in the US and Europe, it's more of a case of the developer really trying to make their own successes and reap the rewards -- that's why you see inspired people entering developers instead of publishers, and that's why it's easier for developers to build up people pretty quickly. Meanwhile, in Japan, the idea's often that you enter a developer because you couldn't join a publisher, so it's harder for them to attract people.
I think of Retro successfully pulling off Metroid Prime and a lot of what happened was the parent company being very hands-on and assisting the outsourced company. That's going to create a give-and-take relationship which can help pull the best of both worlds while ensuring that the game never gets too far off-track, but I think Capcom is just handing their IP out to companies like GRIN and then going back to work on SFxT for iPhone.Quote:
KI: I think it's because Western studios have such a different way of thinking about projects that it becomes a huge learning experience for me. To give one example, something that I can very easily and succinctly explain to a Japanese game maker winds up being something I have to go into all of this extraneous detail to get across to Western developers. And in the midst of all this explanation, I start to realize that I don't have any particularly compelling reason why I'm doing it the way I'm trying to explain it.
It's made me realize that if I want to come up with something that will satisfy Western gamers, I'll have to do something that satisfies Western developers first. That, in turn, will make Westerners want to learn more behind the Japanese process, and it winds up becoming a learning experience for both sides. I think that's very important, and also the most interesting part of working with them.
Really, merging the efforts of a half-baked company like Spark with leadership assistance from people who really know what they're doing should result in an excellent product. One thing I can definitely say for that is from reading the post-mortems on Gamasutra, the breakdown of what went wrong usually begins at some sort of time management/project leader screw up that snowballs through everyone else.
Onimusha's an interesting study in changing a series' tone right. From the original's period-piece semi-survival horror to Dawn of Dreams' full on action, the series was able to morph from one thing to another and do it well.
I have no clue how a dev unfamiliar with creating the games would handle it though. If they're looking to farm out another property, they could've sent it to Infune's new dev. I mean, they're already doing zombies and ninjas, so zombies and samurai wouldn't be a far jump...