The Confessional: It took two years to cancel Singularity, and ten months to fix it - Polidicks

[QUOTE]For a day, the game was cancelled. Dates had been missed, and the project was nowhere near complete. So when the VP from Activision visited the studio and saw the true state of affairs, her assessment – while a shock – wasn’t overly surprising. She made it clear that she was going back to HQ to tell them to cancel Singularity. Perhaps the most painful realization was that we had brought this on ourselves. At the time, Singularity was the only original IP in development at any Activision studio. Unfortunately, the game was in bad shape. At least half of Singularity’s maps didn’t run on the PS3, several didn’t fit in memory on the 360, and even on high-end PCs we would see the framerate slow to a crawl during many combat sequences. This was after the deadline for the second Alpha had long since passed. The decision to can the game wasn't complicated. There were some spots of true genius scattered throughout Singularity, some of which had even survived from the earliest days of the project. Using the time-manipulation device to age a soldier into a combusting skeleton, firing a guided missile from a gun that slows time to a crawl ... these moments were all great fun. They certainly weren’t as plentiful as we would have liked, but the highlights of the game prove memorable. When players recall the game fondly — and this happens with surprising regularity — they remember those moments of inspired play and the few mechanics that survived the initial vision. The lasting legacy of Singularity may be that you can pull at least a pyrrhic victory from the toughest projects with smart use of resources and the ability to focus on a few solid, executable concepts. Ultimately, we released a game we’re proud to have on our resumes. And we all learned a ton as developers, not just about what we can do under pressure but also how to catch production and leadership problems before they result in unrecoverable disaster. Singularity turned out to be a pretty good game – much better than it had any right to be given the constraints – but it would have never become a game at all were it not for decisive leadership and a team of exceptional developers. It took years to run Singularity into the ground, but only 10 months to make a solid game. That schedule goes a long way to explain the games flaws, but it also allows for pride in what was released. I just hope never to be put in that situation again.[/QUOTE] [url]http://www.polygon.com/2014/3/3/5462994/singularity-two-years-to-make-a-mess-ten-months-to-clean-it-up[/url]

I really enjoyed that game

I heard the multiplayer was really unique but never got to play it - it was DOA, no one ever playing. Are there groups of people that organise and play dead MP games like this?

[QUOTE=subenji99;44117969]I heard the multiplayer was really unique but never got to play it - it was DOA, no one ever playing. Are there groups of people that organise and play dead MP games like this?[/QUOTE] There's a subreddit for it somewhere but I can't for the life of me remember what it is [editline]3rd March 2014[/editline] nvm found it [url]http://reddit.com/r/deadgames[/url]

Bah reddit, but worse than that they don't look like they have their shit together at all