20 replies to this topic

[killemoff]

http://www.eurogamer...vs-the-monsters

It's definitely another sad story, one of a brilliant team, eager to put the work in, not take any flak from publishers, and standing their ground, being crushed by greed, burocracy, and sheer extorsion and douchebaggery.

The story of Free Radical Design begins with one of gaming's milestones, and after almost nine years it ended with the studio's blood on several publisher's hands. Founded in April 1999, the Nottingham-based studio created the much-loved shooter series TimeSplitters and third-person psychic drama Second Sight during the PS2 era. But Haze, the company's final game, received a critical mauling, sold poorly, and shortly afterwards Free Radical entered administration.

The pressure on David Doak was unimaginable. "My role at Free Radical meant that I was simultaneously involved in these unpleasant 'high level' discussions with psychopaths who wanted to destroy us, and then the next day sitting with our dev staff at their desks trying to boost people's morale. Helping them to pass milestones that I knew would subsequently be manipulated to cause them to fail. It was the most depressing and pointless thing that I have ever been involved in. The dream job which I once loved had become a nightmarish torture."

Money, my friends, money.

Edited by killemoff, 04 May 2012 - 12:48 PM.

[Scott]

Never liked Timesplitters and never played Haze (But enjoyed the song from KoRn)...

Can't say I'll miss them BUT their story is sad! Not only is it sad but shows that greed only destroys and I realise to the fans of Timesplitters how much Free Radical closiung meant to them and it's a terrible thing, I'm not bothered personally but when a company makes (opinionated) good games it's sad to see them go.

Though I heard most, if not all joined Crytek, in which case, I enjoy Crysis alot!

Edited by Scott, 04 May 2012 - 04:58 PM.

[JezMM]

Ugh, utterly sucks.

If nothing else I just wish Timesplitters 2 or 3 could have gotten a PC release with online play. That would have been a dream.

[Shirou Emiya]

Sheesh.

LucasArts can go fuck right off and go straight to hell, for all I care, now. What a bunch of fucking assholes. It's a good example of how third-party publishers are operating these days.

Edited by Masaru Daimon, 04 May 2012 - 06:23 PM.

[Patticus]

What a pretty depressing read.

What makes it worse is that Goldenye: RA was one of the worst games ever made.

[JezMM]

Damn, just read the article in full and that is horrible. I'm glad it seems to imply that many of the staff at free radical have branched out and found places with other companies elsewhere, but it's so sad that Doak himself's dream job was utterly stomped on like that.

"Everyone knows all the horror stories about development," says Doak. "And it's a real shame, because it turns people off it in the end. There's this aspect open to exploitation where because it's your dream job, doing something you really love, you should endure all kinds of abuse to do it. Having watched it from the sidelines for the last few years, it seems to have gotten worse. It's just this big furnace that burns people. It's like that thing, where if you enjoy sausages you shouldn't see how they're made. That applies to games."

While this quote isn't always true, it's heartbreakingly sad that it's come from the guy who made some of the most fun first person shooters ever created.

[Super Soniko]

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

;_________________; all of my feels

its like a part of me died reading this...

[TimberWolf]

What a pretty depressing read.

What makes it worse is that Goldenye: RA was one of the worst games ever made.

... I liked Rogue Agent...

Well, every level save the last one, where I ended up dying every two seconds from some fucker with an OMEN XR...

[JezMM]

... I liked Rogue Agent...

Well, every level save the last one, where I ended up dying every two seconds from some fucker with an OMEN XR...

Even for the minority who enjoyed it, it was not worth the future of the Timesplitters franchise. 8C

[TimberWolf]

Even for the minority who enjoyed it, it was not worth the future of the Timesplitters franchise. 8C

Never played Timesplitters. <<

[Patticus]

Never played Timesplitters. <<

You probably shouldn't play it now, after all it most likely hasn't aged too well. At the time though, it was simply amazing, travelling to and fighting through all those different, wonderfully realized time periods, and in Future Perfect, Cortez was easily the best character of the time. I'll miss those games, and I'd snap them up in a heartbeat if they were remade in HD.

[BW199148]

Wait no Star Wars Battlefront 3? Fuck My Life, greedy back stabbing bastards!

[JezMM]

Never played Timesplitters. <<

If you can ever get a copy of Timesplitters 2 for the Gamecube/Xbox/PS2, I'd recommend it if you were a fan of the original Goldeneye. Similar to Perfect Dark, it's very much a spiritual sequel to Goldeneye, taking what was great and pushing it further - however in a much more cartooney/zany direction than Perfect Dark's serious cyberpunk one.

[Scott]

If you can ever get a copy of Timesplitters 2 for the Gamecube/Xbox/PS2, I'd recommend it if you were a fan of the original Goldeneye. Similar to Perfect Dark, it's very much a spiritual sequel to Goldeneye, taking what was great and pushing it further - however in a much more cartooney/zany direction than Perfect Dark's serious cyberpunk one.

Alas my reason for not liking Timesplitters, I hate Goldeneye and Perfect Dark sucks IMO, bought the Xbox Live HD(ish) Rerelease and didn't enjoy it :| though upon hearing that menu theme, I got a nostalgic feel as if I've heard it before, but that's another story!

[TimberWolf]

Alas my reason for not liking Timesplitters, I hate Goldeneye and Perfect Dark sucks IMO, bought the Xbox Live HD(ish) Rerelease and didn't enjoy it :| though upon hearing that menu theme, I got a nostalgic feel as if I've heard it before, but that's another story!

You are now forever banned from having an opinion on video games.

[Patticus]

Alas my reason for not liking Timesplitters, I hate Goldeneye and Perfect Dark sucks IMO, bought the Xbox Live HD(ish) Rerelease and didn't enjoy it :| though upon hearing that menu theme, I got a nostalgic feel as if I've heard it before, but that's another story!

Out of interest, what was it about them that you didn't like? I personally loved the hell out of Perfect Dark, but hated Goldeneye, and to be honest I haven't felt much of an urge to play Perfect Dark HD since I bought that either. Could be because I completely wore out my cartridge back in the day, or more likely because I really expected better from a HD re-release of such a revered title. I expected something more like Halo: Anniversary Edition. Oh well...

You'd be hard pressed to find more than a couple of FPS games today with as brilliant a difficulty system as those games had, ones which actually added more objectives and gave you more to do in the game world as you upped the toughness. It didn't just make enemies into bigger bullet sponges, or increase their deadliness, or make them smarter, it gave you, the player, more challenging things to do than simply 'hide in cover for longer'. Not that cover was really a 'thing' in FPSes in those days.

And all that's saying nothing about the phenomenal multiplayer modes, and the really amazing fully customizable bots (called 'sims' in PD), with character models you could alter in various ways, teams you could build any way you liked, different A.I. patterns you could choose from a list so you could equip or handicap any team as much or as little as you wanted. Oh it was wonderful... you don't get that kind of thing nowadays of course, the emphasis is all 'online online online', there's just no room for a good offline sesh with fully personalized teams of A.I. bots any more.

Edit: Oh, and the variety and fun-ness of the weapons was pretty nifty too. Again, don't get too many games these days which have machine-guns doubling up as disguised proxy mines and whatnot.

Edited by Patticus, 06 May 2012 - 04:11 AM.

[JezMM]

I was always a Goldeneye fan over Perfect Dark myself (mainly because as a kid I found Perfect Dark's single player brutally hard, even on the easiest setting), but yes the multiplayer was amazing. I spent hours and hours as a kid making customised multiplayer matches against sims. Timesplitters 2's multiplayer was a beautiful, BEAUTIFUL blend of Goldeneye's simplicity and Perfect Dark's complexity, with a ton of super fun weird game modes as well, such as tag (both in "whoever's it at the end loses" and "last man standing" variants), and a fantastic little assault mode with a nice handful of maps for up to 4 player co-op on a linear objective-based map with an endlessly respawning opposing team of AI enemies to break through.


Oh, and have to add some love as well for the mapmaker. I lost days and weeks in that thing. Created a good three or so single player campaigns of 15+ levels each that I'm still proud of to this day in terms of pushing the simple tools to the limit (once made a puzzle where you had to hit switches in the right order or the mission was failed - THAT was complicated lol).

Aaaa I need to track down a GameCube copy of Future Perfect again. I only ever borrowed one off Pooshoes here.

[Patticus]

I was always a Goldeneye fan over Perfect Dark myself (mainly because as a kid I found Perfect Dark's single player brutally hard, even on the easiest setting), but yes the multiplayer was amazing. I spent hours and hours as a kid making customised multiplayer matches against sims. Timesplitters 2's multiplayer was a beautiful, BEAUTIFUL blend of Goldeneye's simplicity and Perfect Dark's complexity, with a ton of super fun weird game modes as well, such as tag (both in "whoever's it at the end loses" and "last man standing" variants), and a fantastic little assault mode with a nice handful of maps for up to 4 player co-op on a linear objective-based map with an endlessly respawning opposing team of AI enemies to break through.

Oh, and have to add some love as well for the mapmaker. I lost days and weeks in that thing. Created a good three or so single player campaigns of 15+ levels each that I'm still proud of to this day in terms of pushing the simple tools to the limit (once made a puzzle where you had to hit switches in the right order or the mission was failed - THAT was complicated lol).

I too found Perfect Dark's single-player campaign to be incredibly difficult, even on the easiest difficulty setting, so much so that it stands as one of the few campaigns I've never completed. Goldeneye's was also bloody hard to me though, and I never finished that either... and I agree fully on the TimeSplitters multiplayer stuff, it's the closest you can realistically get to those N64 classics without actually playing them. The Assault mode was my favourite one, it was just so much fun!

I spent many hours in the map maker too, but I never did anything as complicated sounding as what you did. Whenever my levels reached a certain level of complexity, I would load the map up to test it and the bloody system would freeze on me, so I tended towards simple designs. I loved it, but I never felt like the map skins they gave me were good enough. I wanted to build some prohibition-era Chicago city streets, things like that, and even in Future Perfect I felt like my ambitions were continually stunted and confounded by it. I made the best of it, but it didn't live up to my expectations of what a map maker should be.

[JezMM]

I spent many hours in the map maker too, but I never did anything as complicated sounding as what you did. Whenever my levels reached a certain level of complexity, I would load the map up to test it and the bloody system would freeze on me, so I tended towards simple designs. I loved it, but I never felt like the map skins they gave me were good enough. I wanted to build some prohibition-era Chicago city streets, things like that, and even in Future Perfect I felt like my ambitions were continually stunted and confounded by it. I made the best of it, but it didn't live up to my expectations of what a map maker should be.

Through experience I did manage to pick up a few clues on certain things that crashed the mapmaker without fail - the alien tileset (white futuristic one) was especially glitchy. Having too many doors on that one or (bizarrely) using the Space Station background music always crashed it.

The FP mapmaker had a ton of cool stuff (adding new objectives mid-level and the ability to display text messages on screen were wonderful additions for constructing storylines - and the ability to have outdoor maps was fantastic, even if only a few of the tilesets really worked with the missing ceiling, oh oh, and trigger activated doors instead of just unlocked or key-locked ones), but I did hate that you HAD to play as Cortez and there was no way to disable the gravity claw thingermabob. Made it very easy to mess up some puzzles by having the ability to chuck stuff around.

[Patticus]

Through experience I did manage to pick up a few clues on certain things that crashed the mapmaker without fail - the alien tileset (white futuristic one) was especially glitchy. Having too many doors on that one or (bizarrely) using the Space Station background music always crashed it.

Yup, those sound like crashes I frequently encountered...

One thing that really didn't sit well with me was the lack of customizable A.I.. I mean, you could change the star rating of any given bot, but that just changes the smarts rather than tells you what kind of bot they are; whether they like to punch you or relentlessly hunt down their last killer etc. It would've been so nice to see a return of that kind of A.I. personality customization.