The first two episodes of Telltale’s Minecraft: Story Mode, a story-driven adaptation of a game wildly fashionable amongst children and households, have been initially written with a teen score in thoughts. Former narrative designer Emily Grace Buck says this is only one instance of how Telltale’s govt group had “fundamental misunderstanding of who our audience was.”
Speaking on the Sweden Game Conference, Buck says that Minecraft isn’t the one instance of studio bosses pushing for grittier storytelling. “Our executive team insisted that what was popular about Guardians of the Galaxy was darkness and violence and sadness. And that people did not associate humour with that brand.”
That led to Telltale’s Guardians getting rewritten to be extra critical and fewer humorous. In her feedback on the convention (captured by GamesIndustry.biz), Buck says “One of the biggest comments in editorial was that it felt very off-tone for Guardians of the Galaxy and wasn’t very funny. And we were like ‘we know.’”
Buck says not each member of the chief group was so ill-equipped to see what followers needed, but it surely may very well be an “uphill battle” to get them to hear. “If you fought it too hard, you would be taken off a project, replaced, or even let go, and that happened to people on a number of occasions.”
At the convention, Buck talked about an M score for Minecraft, although later she amended that on Twitter. Instead, it will’ve been rated T. Buck says “it was not appropriate for young kids… but not that raunchy.”
Former Telltale game designer Stephen McManus says modifications to deliver the game to an E10 score “required just a few line cuts, maybe a dozen total.” But McManus adds “this change was asked for very late in development, creating an unreasonable amount of rework in an unreasonably short amount of time, for a team already dealing with impossible deadlines and other late changes.”
Rewrites have been widespread at Telltale. Buck says the studio usually needed to do 90% rewrites after govt critiques, and a few main revisions would come simply days earlier than a given game’s launch. That implies that whereas a few of the bugs that got here to be related to Telltale have been a part of the engine, some have been the results of executive-driven calls for for last-minute modifications.
“A lot of the time what people thought were frame skips or buggy parts of our engine, were actually scenes that had gotten redone so last minute, that there was no time to smooth out the cinematography or the animation. what you were seeing was not a product of a buggy engine, but buggy management system.”
The concept of an adult-oriented Minecraft or a basic misunderstanding of what individuals like about Guardians of the Galaxy are humorous sufficient, however these missteps had a darkish price, as Telltale’s closure left tons of out of a job with out discover or severance. Buck says solely 20% of former staff have since discovered new work. That’s not a horrible quantity in lots of contexts, however with no security web within the notoriously costly space close to San Francisco the place Telltale was based mostly, it’s not nice.
Musing on how management within the game business could be held accountable to their staff, Buck says “I’m not going to say this is the only answer, or even necessarily the best answer, but especially in the United States, where your work is tied to your healthcare, I think we need to have a really serious conversation about potentially starting a union.”
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