To say the new Homefront game has endured a troubled development would be putting it lightly. Something the studio ultimately responsible for the game would like everyone to know once/if they ever finish Homefront Revolution.
The message below appears at the very start of the game’s closing credits:
Even this first-hand explanation sells the chaos short. First, the developers of the original Homefront closed. Then the series was moved to THQ Montreal, then Crytek UK. Then publisher THQ closed, and Deep Silver picked up the tab. Then Crytek UK ran into financial issues, which led to many involved in the game’s development — including Hasit Zala himself — to walk out.
*deep breath* Then Deep Silver’s parent company Koch Media stepped in, bought the property, set up a new studio and delayed the game from 2015 to 2016. Zala returned to head up development once more.
So when he says “the path has not always been a smooth one”, he’s not kidding!
Still… it’s a weird thing to greet a player once they finish the game. I can’t remember ever seeing anything like it, at least so prominently (some games will hide frustrations in the code, for example).
On the one hand, it’s nice that players can get some kind of appreciation for the troubles this game encountered, and maybe realise that it’s a miracle this game ever made it out of development hell at all.
On the other… the game’s not doing too well critically at the moment, so this might also be seen by some as a kind of excuse.
Me? I haven’t even played it, so what do I know. But I do think it’s cool that they have gone to the trouble of tracking down everyone involved in the game’s development, regardless of studio or publisher, and thanked them all. Not every game has been so kind in similar circumstances.
Comments
6 responses to “New Homefront Has A Very Unusual Message In The Credits”
Timesplitters….
so they realised they were shipping the game in a dodgy state & pre-emptively made excuses & stuck em in the credits?
way to draw attention that somewhere along the line, the ball was dropped. dev just didnt care, or the publisher forced the release too soon.
Could be worse. You could release a half-finished game then months after that release admit that it was half-finished but you shipped it anyway because of a time frame in a total “sorry, not sorry” like EA did.
I don’t think you’ve worked on a long-term project that has been beset by bureaucratic problems.
Developers are people, when you’re working on something for 4 years that keeps getting interrupted, morale starts to run low.
And with probably different publishers and stuff pulling it one way for a year then a different way the next year, by the end of the dev cycle you can see that the project is a bit of a mess, but the only way to fix it would be to commit another year or whatever of development. Sometimes it would be easier to start from scratch. But nobody can afford that.
And probably no one has the enthusiasm for the project anymore at that point.
So what do you do? You pull together what you can, you release and move on to something else. Hopefully you will recover at least of some of your expenses.
BTW, IDK how much of this is applicable, I only skimmed the article. But I thought your comment was too harsh.
This reads more like a thank you than an excuse to me. The discussion of the troubled development just seems to be in there as context.
Is it normal to use “that” as a pronoun instead of “who” when talking about people? It reads weird to me.
“For the team members that have” – shouldn’t it be “For the team members who have” ?
“all of your that have” – shouldn’t it be “all of your who have” ?