I WISH BIGGER DEVS TALKED MORE OPENLY ABOUT THEIR WORK! WE GAIN VERY LITTLE FROM THIS PERSISTENT CULTURE OF SECRECY.

Why can’t we know more about what goes into games?

Finally I’ve spent time with The Quiet Man, and I am absolutely fascinated by it. I can’t put this no-good, very bad mish-mash down and, yes, I may even play the awful thing through twice to get the full effect of the story. It’s been a long time since I’ve engaged with a piece of media that fails so expertly at every turn and everything it sets out to do. Is this love? Or obsession?

I shan’t be too mean to Human Head Studios, but I would love to know what happened during production to result in that end product. Given the studio’s relatively low profile since 2006’s Prey (and the final nail in the coffin, its cancelled sequel in 2014), the story of how it came to collaborate with Square Enix for a glorified spiritual successor to The Bouncer is one I want to hear.

Unfortunately, it is a story I know we’re unlikely to get much sense of beyond apocryphal dribs and drabs over the coming years. Much of game development and production, especially that of high-profile titles, is obfuscated. Some secrecy is understandable, but compared to other media industries games is next-level. This leads to a disconnect between gamers and developers that we see expressed time and time again through periodic storms in a, ahem, puddle.

MUDDYING THE WATERS

The unlikely furore over – of all things – Marvel’s Spider-Man’s puddles, as misguided as it was, was a result of all the other times developers and publishers have failed to communicate effectively with their audience. The visual reining in of 2014’s Watch Dogs is apparently still fresh in the minds of many players. But it also doesn’t improve the chances of having an actual conversation when particularly loud parties with a limited grasp of the practical reality of game development blunder forth with misinformation. The puddlegate party’s unsubstantiated claims of a ‘graphical downgrade’ for Spider-Man was based on screens of the same scene that were very slightly different in terms of watery composition but completely different in terms of lighting, throwing out any hope of a fair comparison. This frequent jumping to conclusions and misunderstanding of the highly changeable nature of game development may well fuel the snake eating its own tail of developers’ secrecy (and was cited by CD Projekt Red as one reason why it waited so long to share a vertical slice of Cyberpunk 2077 with the public).

Insomniac was forthcoming when asked on Twitter why the scene looked different, citing “a design/art/ usability reason thing”. Often we as a magazine get to see behind the curtain, with developers discussing off the record how and why things have happened, but there’s still a reluctance further up the studio food chain to reveal, in depth, the whys and hows of a game’s development in case it’s used to batter them with later.

The dev diary so favoured by smaller projects goes a way into giving a glimpse of how the sausage is made but is something seldom adopted by bigger developers. I still fondly remember the Making Of Silent Hill 2 bonus DVD included with European releases and wonder why that wasn’t the beginning of a trend. I love this medium, but I do wish we’d talk to each other a bit more.