Welcome back to 'What I Do', a feature that shines a spotlight on the essential, bizarre and often unheralded work that people do every day across the video game industry.
Today's instalment is a timely one: it's summer, the time for big game announcements, so I wanted to talk to someone who had some experience with what it was like not just working at a big studio that was going to be starring at a major international games event, but having to meet journalists/fans about a game as well.
That person is Albert (not their real name!), a jack-of-all-trades working across platforms and genres whose identity has been withheld so that they could spill the beans on what it's like getting media training and having to build a vertical slice just so some press could play part of the game ahead of release.
Luke Plunkett: Hi Albert! Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your history in the games business?
A: I've been in the industry for nearly 20 years? How is that true?! I started in QA, where I spent the first five years of my career at a number of studios. I've been a designer for almost 15 years. I've worked at studios of around 60 people up to a studio of nearly 300. I've worked on AAA MMOs, AAA singleplayer RPGs, and AA RPGs. In that time I've been an active part of development on several demos for press, show floors, and publishers. I've primarily worked in content (like quests and such), but I've also worked on PvP modes, co-op gameplay, and other systems as an implementer and lead.
LP: Because it's summer and we've all got big game reveals on our minds, which of those games had a presence at a major show?
A: The MMO and AA RPG I worked on had presences at a major industry show, the MMO multiple times. I also worked on a demo for a big consumer-facing event for the MMO.
LP: What were your exact roles on both games mentioned in these answers?
A: For the MMO I worked on the maps as an open-world designer, as well as in the PvP portions of the game. For the RPG I was responsible for implementing quests.
LP: What was involved in getting the demos ready for the big reveal? Were people pulled off actual work to get them ready? How long did it normally take to put something together?
A: For the MMO, the biggest and most important show demo of ours was the major industry show, as it was the first time any players got their hands on the game. We put a lot of energy into the zones we were showing off, and probably pushed the polish level of those higher than was strictly necessary for that time in development. It was most of the studio focused on that, but ultimately that work wasn't so much throwaway work as it was focus on things that we were either going to need more broadly (like combat skills), or it was work that would ship eventually, think map content.
I honestly don't remember how long we were focusing on it, but it was months and months of essentially the whole studio's time. The fact that it was going to be on the show floor, and thus we couldn't control the impressions the media would get out of it, meant that we were very mindful of not just how it would feel to players at the show, but also how it would look when recorded. The sheer scale of it prevented us from being able to fully polish all of it, but it did allow us to build a slice of our game up to a much closer-to-final level than we had done up until that point. Where and when this work became the most onerous is as we got closer and we needed to make sure the build wasn't going to crash or break in any critical ways. That involved very few changes, but lots of time playing the build, identifying one critical issue and then waiting for a fix.
I was at a studio (if not directly involved) in a trailer that was 100% Grade A bullshit. Essentially our publisher really, really wanted stuff to show and despite the fact that our next project wasn't even in the pitch phase, let alone production...
For the RPG, while we built something using a lot of the existing tools, there was a large amount of work on all disciplines to get things to a level that we were comfortable showing to the press. And a large amount of that work was one-off and trashed afterwards. I'd say we put somewhere in the realm of 3-4 months of work with 25% or more of the studio building things. There was a lot of special-casing of things because it wasn't like the game was ready to ship yet, or even fit within console memory. There were folks that grumbled about it and were upset about throwaway work.
The studio head was a micro-manager about details and so we had daily play sessions where he would find small art issues and pull in multiple people to talk about how we could fix them. He wanted all the details to be very tightly controlled, which honestly just takes a ton of effort, especially in a game with any sort of underlying simulation that is inherently random. A specific example: there was a bush next to a house that we were playing around that would flicker a little at certain points. The studio head was fixated on it and we had to figure out how to fix it for the demo. Which meant a number of leads or other folks getting pulled in to look at it, talk about potential fixes, etc. We also rehearsed so many times to try and have everything perfect. Which was helpful, I suppose, but honestly just overkill.
LP: How did people on the team feel about this? Was it a huge pain in the ass? Did anyone resent being taken off other work for it?
A: For the MMO, I think folks were mostly understanding and onboard, because it was so tightly linked to our first time in front of players and to so many parts that were stuff we would need to do anyhow to ship the game. The most clearly throwaway work was all the stuff required for the specific logistics of a show floor. How do we log people out? What happens if someone walks away in the middle? Stuff like that. That wasn't so much work, but was certainly not related to the actual game at all. That's not considering a lot of the things I didn't have insight into, like planning the show floor, travel plans, etc. It's not easy to get a bunch of PCs over to another country and set up to run for three days straight.
For the RPG, folks weren't super happy. It was a press-only demo that also wasn't going to be recorded, so I think the degree to which that felt like a waste of their time was noticeable. Not to mention that we just had a lot of shit to do in order to try and get the game built and we were always up against milestones. Those two things really pushed folks to a place of seeing this as stupid, rather than necessary. Something with that tight of a leash and the desire to make and see very small changes is always going to be a pain in the ass, because you need builds to process and all that takes time. We also did the work on a separate version of the game build, so it meant you had to be able to swap between places and do your work in the correct location, which is a hassle. It felt very ancillary to the actual work of making a game. And it had the fear always in the air that someone would promise something or say something offhand to the press that would turn into a must-have feature that we had no plans to deliver.
LP: Be honest, how much of these showcases, if any, was bullshit? Not accidentally bullshit (like something WAS going to be in the game but plans changed), but just a straight up smoke and mirrors job?
A: For the MMO, I'd say it was mostly not bullshit. Performance and balance wasn't close to final, but we weren't faking things to any major degree.
For the RPG, I'd say it was 50% bullshit? I literally custom did all the content work, nothing about that was going to ship. And we put our thumb on the scale of all sorts of systems to make the demo exciting and reliable for those of us giving the demo to press. As a simulation game, that's somewhat going to always happen in that you either go in fully with the idea that we're open to whatever, or you very tightly constrain what can and will happen in the demo. For example, if things would sometimes spawn and sometimes not because of the simulation, we would force them to always spawn for the demo.
Our relationship with the press is both antagonistic in some sense but also highly reciprocal...
Actually, now that I think about it, I was at a studio (if not directly involved) in a trailer that was 100% Grade A bullshit. Essentially our publisher really, really wanted stuff to show and despite the fact that our next project wasn't even in the pitch phase, let alone production, we had an external team create a trailer to build hype. It was completely divorced from anything we hoped to do, and it was so early in development that it couldn't help but be misleading or tie our hands. That one sucked. It thankfully didn't eat up a ton of our resources and time, but it was still demoralizing because we had little to do with it and we all knew it was going to be promises that we couldn't necessarily deliver on.
LP: Did you attend any of these events in a public or press-facing capacity? And if so, did you ever receive any kind of media training?
A: Yes, pretty much every single time. Now, front-facing in the first several times was just in the sense of the show floor and talking to fans and players, mostly. But for the RPG I was one of four people presenting to the press. We did get press training each time for the MMO, although it varied in quality.
LP: I've long been fascinated by this: what exactly did that press training entail? Did anyone have to role-play, were there powerpoints, who exactly was doing the training?
The press training took a number of different forms. The most rigorous was an outside consultant coming in, walking us through how to approach things, doing some role-playing, that sort of thing. In general at the MMO studio we would run folks through an internal training before they did any press or public-facing stuff. Some of the key takeaways are: defer to someone else if you aren't sure about the answer, don't let long silences trick you into giving more details, and remember that as soon as you walk out the door, you are working and guard what you say. It's a fairly different experience being with fans compared to the press, however. We generally are less worried about major mistakes with fans, because it's just not the same as a press hit. I am fortunate in that I was able to observe folks that were really good at press before I had to do much myself. And I'm a solid extemporaneous speaker, which is a double-edged sword and hasn't yet gotten me fired, but has come close!
What I've found most personally useful with press is to remember that making shit up or lying is never, ever going to work. Not only are you likely to get called out by your boss, the players are eventually going to actually play the thing! I focus on telling the most positive, but still grounded in reality, version of the story that I can and hope that comes across. For example if we aren't going to release any new skills for a particular class, I want to be able to say something like "Our focus, in this release, is on the classes that are furthest from our overall goals. Something that is really important to us is making sure we are making measured changes that don't put too much stress on the team." Or something like that.
Our relationship with the press is both antagonistic in some sense but also highly reciprocal. And press that are doing their jobs, looking out for the truth and for the audience, will sometimes ask tough questions. But those questions come from an important place and you can bet your players are asking the same ones.
LP: Thanks for your time Albert!
