Feedback - Thoughts on Reviews and How to Grow A Feedback Loop

[hustlertwo]

@Eiwynn

@MultipleChoice

I think there’s always a period of vulnerability whenever you release a story (or whatever) out into the wild, a time period where your Ego will have you counting your stars and where every random person with an opinion affects you very deeply.

I think this is very important for everyone writing and developing a CS game to realizes happens to every developer.

Just to emphasize this point let me share a quote from the directer of a Fallout game from the 1990’s:

“It was just one of many projects that underperformed and would have had to sell miraculous numbers to change the fate of Interplay,” notes Pasetto sadly. "When it came out and got so much bad press, the development team was pretty demoralised. It was a tough time, to put it mildly."

Emphasis is mine but this quote shows that game designers and developers have been feeling vulnerable for decades, even from the earliest days of computer gaming.

As @MultipleChoice says, perhaps we build a tolerance over time concerning “press” or “reviews” but the amount of actionable feedback gained from these sources often is meaningless and even contrary to the reality. Again I turn to this designer/developer from the 1990’s to emphasis this point:

Chris Pasetto left Interplay shortly after Brotherhood of Steel, enduring a mild crisis of faith, and determined to re-evaluate what he was doing, and how. … “I also spent a lot of that time grinding my teeth, thinking about all the nay-sayers who claimed that a Fallout RPG would never sell on consoles.”

Again this thread is to encourage you to build your own specific feedback loop that is relevant to you and that works with and for you and your efforts and not to rely on feedback that does the opposite.

Not to sound insensitive, but he deserved to feel a little bad. I played through Brotherhood of Steel in the mid-2000s and it was generic garbage not suitable for the name. They just spread a thin veneer of Fallout over that Baldur’s Gate Dark Shadows (or whatever it was called) engine that wasn’t all that entertaining to begin with (think Diablo 2 without the atmosphere). Just because you have Radroaches and bottle caps doesn’t make you a worthy Fallout game. I played it shortly after trying F2 for the first time and it was just a kick in the nuts.