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CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)

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Re: CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)

#481

Post by gambiting »

anonunivgrad wrote: post #245
munk-a wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, and most software developers in Vancouver aren't participating with foreign companies at those rates. The laws remain how they are mostly to disenfranchise QA testers which remain a very hard labour segment to mobilize. There are thousands of "I can make money playing games?!?" folks out there that drown out the really good QA folks and insure that EA can maintain its churn. For regular dev jobs, I think the ma…

Any decent software employer in the US will have good insurance that basically guarantees your max out of pocket health expenses won’t exceed a few thousand dollars. That doesn’t really account for the difference.

>>your max out of pocket health expenses won’t exceed a few thousand dollars.

Wait, that's meant to be good? What kind of insanity is this. Why do you have to pay anything out of your pocket at all??

Re: CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)

#482

Post by killtimeatwork »

icedchai wrote: post #180
29athrowaway wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can be employee #2 of a startup, receive a lot of stock early on and then see it dillute to fractions of a cent. Perfectly legal.

This happened to me back in the 90's. Company 1: The company went bankrupt, founder renamed the company, started a new company with the same name as the original, transferred some assets for pennies on the dollar. It later went public, but collapsed in the dot-com crash. Company 2: Company raised $50 million during the dot-com boom. After 5 or so years, it still did not have much revenue to speak of. After several do…

> Company 1: The company went bankrupt, founder renamed the company, started a new company with the same name as the original, transferred some assets for pennies on the dollar. It later went public, but collapsed in the dot-com crash.

Is that legal? It looks like the CEO of the company willingly harmed the company's interest to enrich himself, which is basically fraud.

Re: CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)

#483

Post by dusted »

pavlov wrote: post #7

This company has probably the shittiest gamified bonus system that I've ever heard of: "CDPR leaders would hand out tokens every month to staffers who went above and beyond, and those tokens were supposed to be transferrable into bonuses if the game met “certain criteria, like critical acclaim and a timely release,” according to the report." [1] Get paid in "crunch mode experience points" handed out by middle manager…

If getting anything at all for overtime and crunch is your definition of shittiest, you've not seen shit :)

Re: CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)

#484

Post by tsss »

setpatchaddress wrote: post #248
deeviant wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually think the bugs/performance issues are helping CDPR right now. Everybody is talking about them rather than how bad the game actually is. The combat is simplistic. The AI opponents are basically broken. The quickhack system does indeed feel like a quickly hacked together game mechanic. V is stuck in a weird state between existing background (a la witcher) and player action defined: I didn't get the feeling o…

I'm pretty happy with it (on a high-spec PC). I've never seen a great interstitial "hacker" interface in a game. Unless you go full Shenzhen I/O, it has to be simplified into meaninglessness. I wonder if some people just prefer dirt and elves and magic to steel and glass. I like Witcher 3 well enough, but it's not a world I want to spend endless time in. I see the charm, but I'm not that interested in that world. Sha…

Deus Ex: Human Revolution showed how a good hacking mini game can be done. Besides, hacking is only one instance in a long series of disappointments. Pretty much every single feature of this game is shallow and badly implemented.

Re: CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)

#485

Post by tester34 »

thepete2 wrote: post #160

"we started with a score of 70, but now it’s 79. If you filter those who have played 10 hours or more, the score is 85 –so the more you play the more enjoyment you feel." Lying with statistics 101. It's obviously impossible that people who didn't enjoy the game played less than 10 hours

did he actually lie?

he also stated that _overall_ score that includes everyone went from 70 to 79.

Re: CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)

#486

Post by tester34 »

mattnewton wrote: post #170
thepete2 wrote: post #160

"we started with a score of 70, but now it’s 79. If you filter those who have played 10 hours or more, the score is 85 –so the more you play the more enjoyment you feel." Lying with statistics 101. It's obviously impossible that people who didn't enjoy the game played less than 10 hours

Came here to post this. The obvious conclusion is that you are at the very least filtering out people who stopped playing because of game breaking bugs.

did he actually lie?

he also stated that _overall_ score that includes everyone went from 70 to 79.

Re: CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)

#487

Post by dusted »

I am running a last gen system (PC) and the game runs fine even with everything on max (except for ray-tracing which I don't think look that good but hits performance a lot).

I don't think CDPR should have released for old consoles, it's going to misrepresent the game no matter what, and just take extra effort.

Re: CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)

#488

Post by silveroriole »

ajkjk wrote: post #394
blihp wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't think for a second that employees 'are not afraid to convey such bad news'. Between the massive years-long hype, delays and bad press about crunch time around the title, not to mention being the most lucrative time of year for a game release, it's very likely that management egos were fully engaged in this release. When that happens reality is no longer driving, or even on, the bus. There may have been one or t…

I heard an interesting take: that CDPR knew that this would happen, but had to choose between "missing the holidays" and "launching even though it's broken" and decided the latter was just less of a problem.

Launching broken isn’t an unexpected thing for this type of game. Everyone is used to falling-apart-at-the-seams Bethesda games, constant patches, even full-on crashes are now apparently acceptable on a console. I saw some people saying “I bought it, but I’ll wait a few months to play until they’ve patched it,” and they think that’s fine. I totally understand why CDPR made that choice. A console game being broken on release is no longer a disaster.

Re: CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)

#489

Post by gambiting »

SeanBoocock wrote: post #333
munk-a wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CDPR sounds like a relatively progressively run game company tbh. A lot of game dev companies deny you overtime during the run up to a major release and massively layoff staff after releases. Up here in British Columbia all technical workers[1] are overtime exempt because EA ran roughshod over our labour laws a number of years ago and people are too afraid to change them for fear of driving off businesses. 1. Vaguely…

Not true of EA, at least in the United States. EA hires junior employees as non-exempt for their first couple of years. They are also in my experience among the most progressive big publishers when it comes to overtime and work/life balance. Not perfect, but certainly trying in a real way across most of its studios. Source: Worked for, but not currently employed at, several EA studios over the last decade, including…

I work at Ubisoft(in the UK[0]) and overtime and crunch are heavily discouraged, to a point where as a matter of policy, we are asked to report to higher management if anyne is asked to do overtime - it just shouldn't be happening at all. I've worked on two big AAA releases in the last 6 years and my total overtime was statistically zero, I did some extra hours in the last 2 weeks leading to release, but that was mostly to watch over the server infrastructure to make sure the launch went smoothly.

We've had people join from Rockstar, EA, CDPR, and one thing everyone is always surprised by is how good the work/life balance is. I'm personally in around 8am and always done by 4pm(7.5 hours a day).

[0] - now, all Ubisoft studios set their own policies. Please don't extrapolate my experience in the UK to experiences in other Ubisoft studios in other countries.

Re: CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)

#490

Post by tsss »

kodt wrote: post #371
pier25 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience on a mid range PC has been good in terms of performance and bugs. The game has some truly amazing aspects such as writing, characters, music, etc, but IMO it falls flat in terms of gameplay. Gunplay, stealth, hacking, open world mechanics, driving... it's all very mediocre even poor at times.

I felt the same but after spending more time, things are starting to click. Stealth for example is not nearly as good as Deus Ex: Mankind Divided or The Metal Gear Solid series. The tutorial seemed alright but when it came to real gameplay I felt like stealth just didn’t work and I just resorted to guns blazing. But after more effort and getting a better hang of quick hacking I have found stealth to be viable actuall…

There is no NPC driving AI. They just follow a pre-defined scripted path and teleport if they can't keep up in missions.
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