Ubisoft Designer: Hardcore Shooter Market 'Too Narrow' to Support Development

Well, I got good news for you tactical gamer fans. Blackfoot Studios, a relatively new game studio which is founded by John Sonedecker (worked on both the original Ghost Recon + expansions and original Rainbow Six series + expansions), is currently developing Ground Branch. This game will be returning to the roots of the tactical shooter genre. There's already a big community and John is also online on the forums every day to listen to our input and discuss things with us. Their mantra is "build your game around a community" which is superb I think.

You can check them out at: www.blackfootstudios.com/forums

There are also monthly newsletters with updates, story info etc. The first one can be found here: http://www.blackfootstudios.com/newsletter/BFS_Newsletter1_Sept07.pdf

For the other newsletters you must be registered on the forum. And much much more other info can be found on the forums too :)

smaller market? make smaller games.

give me a DS tactical shooter. remember - i'm hardcore. i don't care that much about pretty graphics. if my hardcore friends ooze about how awesomely difficult your tactical shooter is, i'll take notice.

Marketing. :(

I wish I had the money to open a studio, I would make nothing but tactical FPS games, flight sims, space combat sims and adventure games. You know, all the awesome genres that have been abandoned because they don't appeal to a "wide audience."

I think it's funny they see Ghost Recon as hardcore. What makes it any more hardcore than other titles?

i had high hopes for ArmA, but the horrid interface, dated graphics, framerate issues, AI, and bugs turned me off to that game. now all my hopes and dreams are pinned on Operation Flashpoint 2. if codemaster's bones it up, there will be no other tactical shooter on the horizon to look forward to.

This guy is right. Hardcore niche market shooters like Half Life 2 and Call of Duty 4 are doomed to failu... hey wait a minute...

This guy is simply trying to make excuses. Maybe he can explain a poll on the official forums where gamers overwhelmingly asked for a tougher, more realistic and gritty experience. No, he is just trying to justify ramming a faulty design down everyone's throat. He has to, it is launch time.

RVS was the most popular of the series at it's launch. And then what happened? That is where it went off the rails. You can't look at it any other way but someone thought, "You have to be too smart to play this title. Let's take away all of the 'work' and free the gamer." How asinine. R6 possessed a wonderful heritage that made it singularly unique. And then what happened? They traded it all for cornrow assaulters and a cover system stolen from another game that borrowed it from another game.

I was doing some advisory work at Redstorm when they were building Lockdown. The PS2 was the lead platform. I sat down with John Slaydon (Lockdown Lead) and he showed me the current design and talked about their mechanics and the targeted experience. I looked at him like he was a martian and told him he was making a fatal and enormous error. He and I never spoke after that and needless to say he wasn't at RSE after that title. He also caught all of the blame due to Steve and others that approved his design. They sidestepped and ducked and he died on the tarmac.

The people at Ubisoft apparently feel that consoles are where the money lies and console gamers are idiots. I am an older gamer but I have all 3 consoles and for the most part game them when I am not in VBS2 on the PC. Plenty of console gamers would like a more challenging and hardcore game. Because the developers there lack the design talent in no way adds truth to their statements.

Their goal has been to make their games more accessible. By accessible they mean allowing inexperienced gamers to jump in and survive, mainly in MP. They have the right idea - make the title more accessible - but the wrong approach. Their approach also means remove the realism and dumb down the mechanics. They are worse than the US Army for identifying an issue and treating the symptom rather than the problem.

This error also bleeds over and completely ruins the single game experience. There are a host of other design flaws. Personally I have given up totally on the series and prefer to go back to RvS where modders are putting the finishing touches on new thermal scopes and the like. Real thermal scopes not to mention shotgun door breaching.

I would be glad to at least see this supposedly insightful developer come clean on something else. While he is feeling all honest, stop referring to Vegas as a tactical or realistic shooter. It isn't. It also isn't R6, it is Vegas.

the last tactical game i enjoyed was swat3 and 4. too bad those games never caught on around these parts

"We have some ideas to improve on the situation though--keep in mind however that we want our games to be accessible to as many people as possible, otherwise we just couldn't keep making games."

This coming from the company that made such a horrific port of Splinter Cell: Double Agent (and almost all other games in the past couple of years) that it was not possible to even complete the game!

Just come out and say it Ubisoft, you're no longer a PC developer.


Mystery

R6 was an awesome game *and* sold well.

Boooo, publicly traded companies. Booooo.

This has been true for awhile, and the games that have been coming out simply reinforce that fact.
Everything is a team based, dumbed down, chance driven, pale shadow of the games I love to play. I understand it's all a matter of preference, but I don't like all these "easy" shooters that are all the rage today, they just aren't fun.

This sub-thread had some decent points (though mostly talking about tf2) -- http://www.shacknews.com/laryn.x?id=16502390

I realize the studio's don't make money off of niche games for the most part, but that doesn't make being a member of a niche market suck any less =(

Also, I hope QuakeLive takes off like wildfire and proves them all wrong ... but I'm not counting on it by any means.

It's funny that they say this, considering how much has not been done in "hardcore shooters" yet. There is a massive amount of potential there, and it's within reason that a hardcore game could be done in a fashion that (gasp!) appeals to even the mainstream via various design techniques and principles.

But, hey, whatever. After GRAW and R6V, I didn't expect to ever see another 'hardcore' version of those series again. This isn't exactly a surprise.

Ok, why doesnt ubisoft have one team make R6 arcade games like vegas. Then hire another smaller team to make a tactical shooter using all the already made assets? Surely costs could be kept reasonably low to make a profit.

Also i'm sick of this "wider appeal" bullshit, You dont make a game for the casual user or partime gamer ot average gamer. That isn't a target audience. You make a game cuz X amount of people want a tactical shooter, or X amount of people want deathmatch or X amount of people want a sequal to peggle.

Then realistcally look at how big the potential market is for that game and create a game with a budget in mind instead of some huge sum based on wild generalizations. Another hardcore Rainbow Six game WOULD sell. They were selling very well before the series got "casual gamer'd".

Though clearly shooting down the idea of returning to the Rainbow Six series' roots, Therien did leave some hope for development of a game that might please both markets.

You can't truly please both markets. That's the whole point. That's why people are still asking about a tactical shooter from RedStorm ala Rainbow Six and Rogue Spear. Some folks cross over but many folks want one or the other without the sacrifices needed to include both in one game.

I find CoD4's hardcore mode provides everything I want in an FPS game, but there are folks out there who want the more hardcore sim feel or a more arcade-like shoot-em-up or pure FPS deathmatch feel.

If they think they can offer both in one game they're sadly mistaken. On one hand it's already been offered in CoD4, and on the other, they're still not going to steal away the dedicated audiences that play sims or that play [Insert FPS Deathmatch Game Title Here].

Honestly Ubisoft has had nothing but a steaming pile of crap coming out of their office lately. They dumb down their series for consoles and do crappy ports over to the PC. After enough patching, if they decide to patch, the game might run fine. Maybe they should step up their QA and make more quality games.

The studio that made Operation Flashpoint and ArmA are still in business. That seems to fly in the face of this statement, it should read "we cannot make huge money hats making hardcore games so we would rather make simple ones"

Ubisoft's series have gone down in quality since the first console only (RS:L GR2) titles came out. I still can play Ghost Recon 1 or Raven Shield (on PC or Xbox) and have more fun than I do with GRAW and Vegas.

Good thing we have developers like Bohemia Interactive and Blackfoot Studios who are still making tactical shooters.

This is completely biased and unscientific, but it seems like the Milsim players tend to log in long hours and seriously give a damn about their rankings. Why not take a page from AirSoft and exploit them by going with a subscription model (like field fees, new guns, club/association membership, etc.). It keeps the genre and the developer going.

Charge for service packs every time a new gun model comes out. As long as it is like the real thing (ie. acts something like it, is licensed by HK, etc.) they will pay.

Hey Publishing Companies and Higher Profile Developers.

How about you stop dumping millions into a game that isn't even tested fully nor has mass market appeal and get something that actually plays well.

Then you can complain about shit being "Too Narrow."

Every development studio should pay a small team of guys to make whatever-the-hell-they-want type games. The ones we had before production costs got bigger than Hollywood movies. It shouldn't take an independent developer to release something creative.

If the engine is moddable, making a "hardcore" gametype shouldn't be that difficult, unless they mean the fullblown floorplans and mission planning shit that the original rainbow 6 had. But making a gametype to make the weapon damage realistic and things like that shouldn't be too hard.