DarkSeas Games' Ian Fisch came up to his blog to talk a little bit about Ride to Hell: Retribution. As he points out, Ride to Hell is one of the worst critically received games in recent memory, and he wanted to clear the air with what went wrong with the game and how he plans to avoid developer Eutechnyx's mistakes.
Now, just to be clear, Eutechnyx is a veteran in the industry, founded in 1987 as Zeppelin Games. They've spent the last sixteen years working exclusively on racing games, and have particularly made a name for themselves recently with the NASCAR games. Their games may not consistently rate 10 out of 10, but they can certainly make decent games.
Ian explains that they can make this assessment of Ride to Hell since DarkSeas' developers themselves have worked with bigger studios in the past. Playing the game themselves, they recognized Eutechnyx made mistakes in planning, scheduling and overall design.
So, as most reviews of the game point out, you can actually see what Eutechnyx ideally had in mind with Ride to Hell. It has an open world, cover based shooting, motorcycle combat, and cinematics. In application, the shooting is broken, the open world is considerably smaller than it looks, the cinematics are poorly made, and motorcycle combat has been reduced to a few lousy quick time events.
Generally, Ian thinks Eutechnyx spread themselves too thin by tasking each developer to handle different aspects of the game at the same time, instead of handling each aspect to perfection one at a time. Ian then relates a similar experience he himself had with an unreleased game, working under Pyro Studios. He concludes that fans really shouldn't be blaming Eutechnyx or their individual developers, as he is sure they knew there were problems with the game as it was being made, and were likely frustrated with it too.
I think Ian has a solid point, but to add, Eutechnyx's production was troubled from the beginning. The game was originally announced in 2008 to release 2009 only to get cancelled early. It was laudable for Eutechnyx to keep working on what may have been a passion project for them, but they should have recognized that the game was not good enough to release when they did and either cancelled it outright or did more work on it.
Road Redemption will avoid Ride To Hell's pitfalls simply because DarkSeas worked on the core gameplay first to make sure it is basically a fun experience. In case they run out of money midway, DarkSeas will still be able to ship a solid product, and they will then use sales money to finish the game.
While it can be frustrating when games like Ride To Hell or Aliens: Colonial Marines comes out, maybe we as gamers should recognize that these developers did not intend to ship a bad product. We take for granted how broad and difficult a process game development is because the top AAAs make it look easy, but overall, we should appreciate that everyone in the industry shares the passion for games that we do.
Image is from Ride to Hell: Retribution.
Source: Road Redemption Developer Blog
