<story><title>The Cabal: Valve’s Design Process for Creating Half-Life (1999)</title><url>https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131815/the_cabal_valves_design_process_.php</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ArtWomb</author><text>Cabal. Design Bible. All grounded in the Single Source of Truth philosophy. With feedback from 200+ playtest sessions directly incorporated into the stream. And the result is the cohesive narrative vision in Half-Life.&lt;p&gt;Contrast this with &amp;quot;What Went Wrong with Cyberpunk 2077&amp;quot; exegesis from Bloomberg this morning and I&amp;#x27;m still not sure anyone can point to a single reason beyond &amp;quot;we were too ambitious&amp;quot;. I wish this breakdown were more technical in nature. Like a good GamaSutra postmortem. I suspect tooling plays an enormous role. UE4 Blueprints are phenomenal for visual development. But does it scale to teams of hundreds of designers?&lt;p&gt;Inside Cyberpunk 2077&amp;#x27;s Disastrous Rollout&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;2021-01-16&amp;#x2F;cyberpunk-2077-what-caused-the-video-game-s-disastrous-rollout&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;2021-01-16&amp;#x2F;cyberpunk...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Guthur</author><text>HL to Cyberpunk 2077 is very much apples to oranges, on many levels.&lt;p&gt;* The team size required for a modern day AAA title is significantly higher than that of HL days.&lt;p&gt;* The games design choices are vastly different. HL was very on the rails, though hides it it really well by giving you the illusion of a large world, this a really great design trick and HL is rightly lauded for it. In contrast CP2077 aims to be closer to a true open world that tries to provide a linear storyline inside a large world with more open level design with many auxilary story lines and interactive world building.&lt;p&gt;* HL had a single platform focus (PC) for the initial development whereas CP2077 try to straddle two very different hardware generations and a multitude of platforms. If CP2077 had, in a hypothetical world, only focused on PC and maybe current gen consoles (PS5 and XBox S) it would not have nearly the same level of negative press.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Cabal: Valve’s Design Process for Creating Half-Life (1999)</title><url>https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131815/the_cabal_valves_design_process_.php</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ArtWomb</author><text>Cabal. Design Bible. All grounded in the Single Source of Truth philosophy. With feedback from 200+ playtest sessions directly incorporated into the stream. And the result is the cohesive narrative vision in Half-Life.&lt;p&gt;Contrast this with &amp;quot;What Went Wrong with Cyberpunk 2077&amp;quot; exegesis from Bloomberg this morning and I&amp;#x27;m still not sure anyone can point to a single reason beyond &amp;quot;we were too ambitious&amp;quot;. I wish this breakdown were more technical in nature. Like a good GamaSutra postmortem. I suspect tooling plays an enormous role. UE4 Blueprints are phenomenal for visual development. But does it scale to teams of hundreds of designers?&lt;p&gt;Inside Cyberpunk 2077&amp;#x27;s Disastrous Rollout&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;2021-01-16&amp;#x2F;cyberpunk-2077-what-caused-the-video-game-s-disastrous-rollout&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;2021-01-16&amp;#x2F;cyberpunk...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>klmadfejno</author><text>&amp;gt;UE4 Blueprints are phenomenal for visual development. But does it scale to teams of hundreds of designers?&lt;p&gt;This comment seems to come out of nowhere. Cyberpunk isn&amp;#x27;t written in UE4 to the best of my knowledge. But rant time! I love ue4 blueprints. I think they&amp;#x27;re the bees knees because documentation of things is so hard, but blueprints make that so easy! The ability to grab a bunch of nodes and collapse them into one node means you can comfortably make your top level view of things just a series of collapsed nodes with long form descriptions in full sentences. So your high level stuff is basically pseudocode.&lt;p&gt;Most people don&amp;#x27;t do this of course. But then most people don&amp;#x27;t write good code, and lots of people writing blueprints  one sees in the wild don&amp;#x27;t even know how to code to begin with.&lt;p&gt;Blueprints are, imo, what people really want when they think they want jupyter notebooks for data science.</text></comment>