That just emphasises the point completely.

Devs don’t intentionally go out trying to make a bad game, or an ugly looking game.

They spend months and months agonising over decisions and coming to compramises to get the best out of difficult situations.

For a reviewer to come along now, and say: ‘Wow! That looks s**t! I don’t care why… Graphics: 2/10′ shows just how little they know about the game development process.

I’m not talking about games that look worse than other games in their genre. I’m talking about games that are the best looking game in their genre, way better than any other similar available game, but some muppet reviewer comes along and can’t even recognise this.

Then the design is bad? The result is the same, it looks bad.

Well I’m currently working on my 14th game, and never has it happened on any of the games that I’ve worked on that anything gets added/removed after alpha without the game being delayed for at least another quarter.

After alpha, there generally isn’t time to do anything other than bug fixing and optimisation.

Tbh, all reviewers really need is to understand how games are financed, not made. At the end of the day, many of the decisions people complain about are due to a lack of time, money and resources, not lack of creativity.

No, but that’s not the whole story.

It comes down to unrealistic expectancy and incorrect understanding. Some reviewers still believe that developers are making the game right up until the Gold Master goes out.

They think that devs should spend their time ‘fixing’ all of the bad opinions that they came out with in their previews, and that this is how the development process should be.

They don’t seem to understand that the game is content complete at Alpha stage.

They don’t seem to understand that most games start out with a scope twice as big as the final product ends up being, and that loads of things usually get thrown out to get the game running properly.

Reviewers are still in the habbit of slating games for certain points, but then not even bothering to think that there is no alternative. For example, a reviewer marking a game down for looking a certain way, when the way that it looks has been forced by the design.

If they actually had to sit down and go through all of the head scratching that devs do, they might do a better job of marking games down for the right reasons…

In no way do you have to be able to create something in order to criticise how enjoyable you found it to be.

He’s gone now.

In fact it’d be nice to see that done outside of the games sphere as well.

I’d be impressed at any journalist who could even so much as net a job with the kind of attitude you described. That level of stupidity is usually only reserved for the commenting fanbase.

Yeah, ‘tighten up the graphics on level 3′ is a classic…

BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA !

I learned all I know about game development from this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbIWN8bufWI

I’m sometimes shocked how little game journalists seem to know about the development process. Stuff like expecting features to be simply added or removed a few weeks before release!

And while I do think that’s a catchier title than “This is a game where you ride in a truck and shoot things and Nathan Fillion’s there, I guess,” Bungie took my idea. So now I can’t make a game. Ever. Because that was my magnum opus, and now my dreams are crushed.