Developing PC Games

Titan Quest was an action-RPG released for the PC a few years ago, and while it was generally seen as a Diablo-clone, the game was still a ball of fun. Levels were huge, the visuals scaled very nicely with better equipment and still look incredible on today’s machines, and the backdrop was ancient mythology, a reading interest I’ve had since young.

The studio responsible for the game title, Iron Lore Entertainment, closed down just in February this year however. In a parting shot, its creative director, Michael Fitch, wrote what has – arguably – become one of the most detailed criticisms about the difficulties in PC game development. His write-up covers piracy, technical support, fan-base, and game reviewers. In fact, I think his write-up should be read by every GET student. There’s an incredible amount of perceptions that while may be controversial, are still thought-provoking nonetheless.

“We had another reviewer who got crashes on both the original and the expansion pack. We worked with him to figure out what was going on; the first time, it was an obscure peripheral that was causing the crash, a classic hardware conflict for a type of hardware that very, very few people have. The second time, it was in a pre-release build that we had told him was pre-release. After identifying the problem, getting him around it, and verifying that the bug was a known issue and had been fixed in the interim, he still ran the story with a prominent mention of this bug. With friends like that…”

The original and rest of the article by Fitch is here.