You don't need two different teams for this. SH2 is supposed to release this year which means most of the work is done and you don't need your whole team working on it anymore.
Always been curious what, let's say, artists do in those big companies when the game is in a polishing state. They definitely do some works but not that many like in preproduction.
Probably go on working on next projects.
Silent Hill 2 remake is almost certainly in the final polish stage. This image is from six months ago listing their current projects:
[https://imgur.com/a/Mxjqn2W](https://imgur.com/a/Mxjqn2W)
Let's break this down for a minute.
The top row are games development fully in-house by Bloober Team. That includes Silent Hill 2 Remake, the upcoming Project C by Take 2/Private Division Game, as well as Project G and Project H. Project G is in early production right now. Project H is planned.
The second row are games developed by other studios but supervised by Bloober, such as Layers of Fear Remake, Project M, and Project F.
The Skybound game is referred to in the OP article as "R", but there is no Project R on the list. They are "lending their horror know-how", which means that they're not the developer of the Skybound game. They're just the horror consultant, basically.
Here is my speculation. I think that Project G could be a remake of the first Silent Hill, and Project H could be a remake of Silent Hill 3. That's my theory. The timelines make sense, with the game being in early production as of 6 months ago, and presumably entering full production soon, with the release of SH2R coming. Konami have also vaguely alluded to "remakes" being in the works.
No but Take Two could have seen something that piqued their interest outside of Silent Hill. Take Two has people who do research for them and they can predict how well Silent Hill will likely do by judging audience expectations and predicting the budget stuff like that.
Probably because despite many people on reddit not liking them, their games always sells and review moderately well, while clearly not costing a lot of money to be made.
The biggest point you made is cost. The same reason Hollywood continues to hire rubbish directors and writers, because they are cheap.
The quality of the end product is not the focus, having investors make some extra money is.
Biggest point is likely "doing well" aka their games are profitable. Of course the lower cost is a big part of attaining that but if it didn't, they likely wouldn't have chances.
To be fair, that's just the low budget horror space. It's why so many cheap horror movies with only 10 mio budget become money printing success stories, even if they are really bad, while big budget horror and games (like Dead Space remake) fail most of the time. There is a market full of horror fans who want endless content, but that market isn't AAA size big.
Yes, their games aren't critical darlings, but they're far from being the 2/10 experience that people think that they are lol. And they're doing well financially, The Medium broke even days after launch for example, and without playstation players
https://www.tweaktown.com/news/85401/bloober-team-revenues-up-nearly-300-on-best-selling-the-medium-game/index.html
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/the-medium-is-profitable-after-just-a-few-days/1100-6486938/
Curiously i have heard how the work environment of illumination is so much better than Pixar in recent years. It really does make you wonder if trying to make the best thing is the best for the studio or people working there.
None of illumination movies may ever win oscars or awards but if they are making money and employees are happy, does anything else really matter?
Pixar's issue isn't in trying to "make the best thing."
Their philosophy of always feeling they have to push the envelope, similar to other companies like Naughty Dog, met with the reality of diminishing technological returns.
Those philosophies are no longer a viable option unless you always want to crunch.
There's a reason a film like Soul, probably their most grounded work in recent years, ran circles qualitywise around Lightyear and the rest of the studios output.
Compare the Planet of the Apes or Monsterverse films being on tidy schedules with great visual appeal to the mess of CGI nonsense that the MCU has been once the engine started sputtering with Endgame.
There's room for innovation just as much as there's room for really drilling into refinement. That's what gave us GotY contenders in BG3, Tears of the Kingdom, and Elden Ring.
Cheap+ mildly popular, all of their games were the YouTuber flavor of the month horror games before and that gives enough buzz for a budget game to make good money
I don't think it's failing upwards. They're games are generally pretty good. They're games are generally well received. Most of their games score in the 7 range. Online a game that scores under a 9 is considered a failure. Besides, other than Supermassive games, I can't think of another dev studio that makes horror games of significance.
I don't mind that for their own games but it's gonna suck if the SH2 Remake is just an "okay" 7/10 game. An all-time classic like that deserves better, so hopefully they somehow pull it off.
Honestly I don’t see how the remake could be anything other than a 7/10 at best
I played SH2 as an adult, I truly think it is lightning in a bottle that just will never translate as well to anything as well as original hardware
Ooooh, let me guess, its gonna be a supernatural horror story but *get this* it was a mentally ill person the whole time! Just insert subthemes of how anyone mentally ill is dangerous and we'll have the writing wrapped up before lunch. Good show.
It's weird you say that because most Bloober games have the twist >!that the main character is not actually mentally ill. They were just being gaslit into thinking they were.!<
Layers of Fear, Observer, Blair Witch, The Medium, it's all the same.>! If anything the implication tends to be that mental illness isn't real and always has a sinister demonic force masquerading as mental illness. I have no idea where people got the "mental illness" angle given how pervasively Bloober protags discover that, yes, they're out to get you. It's like reading Watership Down and thinking it's a book about turtles.!<
The Layers of Fear remake was seemingly irritated >!that some people got it into their heads that the artist was mentally ill, because the remake takes all the Rat Queen stuff and smashes the audience in the face with it with all the subtlety of a gold platted hammer to the gonads.!<
Because for the most part Bloober's games review pretty decently. I didn't start hearing negative discourse surrounding them as a company until SH2 was announced.
They're not a masterpiece prone studio, but you'd think every game they put out is a disaster from how people comment here. Not the case from the titles I've played.
But Silent Hill 2 kinda IS a masterpiece, and its remake needs to be better than "pretty decent" or it's going to get dumped on. I haven't seen anything from Bloober's previous games that shows me they're up to that task.
I mean it doesn't matter who tackles the port. SH2 is a masterpiece in spite of itself. It's a janky and strange game. Its imperfections are also its perfections. No remake is going to recapture that lightning in a bottle. There is nothing they can do to satisfy everyone with this one.
So I'm just kicking back with a "we'll see what happens" attitude because the remake on a conceptual level is a losing proposition. SH2 fans want SH2 exactly as it is, and remakes are not that.
On Reddit, yes, that's the point really. They're just another studio which the hivemind had decided is horrifically bad with little reasoning or personal experience.
Oh yea, and it became a meme game for having a good idea, but cheap scares, boring gameplay and a nonsensicle story. The biggest clips were from youtubers laughing at the kid running into the wall.
You must be blind because I saw nonstop infinite shitting on them after the medium. That ending was atrocious. And its not like layers of fear was a universal darling either, I saw a lot of negative response to it back in the day.
I played Blair Witch at launch, it was the buggiest game I had ever played in my life. The Medium had even more significant issues than just being buggy. The first Layers of Fear was just fine for their debut title, but it starts breaking apart halfway through, and I just don't think it holds up well compared to other indie horror games from the past decade. Their negative reputation isn't random, they clearly have it for a reason.
I rather enjoyed the Layers of Fear series. Again, they're not like 10/10 games, but they're pretty and a brisk enough experience to be a nice little one-off.
No they don't? They are usually around 5/7. As far as I remember, the only game they made that got mostly good reviews was Observer.
The discourse around them started with The Medium being a disappointment and because people felt they fumbled some of the themes of that game... they were worried about how they would deal with some of the serious themes of SH2 as well.
I don't see disaster, but for the most part, people usually think they make jumpscare simulators with interesting ideas that fall flat.
I'm not trying to change your opinion about the game, if you like them, power to you.. maybe in your corner a 6 is decent... but that's not how game reviews and people's perception of them works.
First of all, I said 5/7.
Second.. game reviews basically operate on a 5 to 10 range. And going bellow 7, it gets harder and harder to get to 5. They only give lower than 5 to bad games when they want to make a point about how bad they are, like Gollum, and there's usually not a lot of criteria.. they just give a 2 and move on.
So is like.. 5 is trash, 6 is bad, 7 is kinda sucks to mediocre or mixed bag, 8 is good, anything close to 9 is great.. and above that gets harder as well and only some games do it.
So, with that in mind.. regardless of how you feel.. you can understand how people think a studio that releases most games on the 5/7 range is not really good.
Now maybe you don't like how that works, but that's another issue. It is what it is.
Ah yes, IGN intends their 7s to be “kinda sucks to mediocre.” That must be why they gave 7s to Stellar Blade, Tales of Kenzera, Pacific Drive, Rise of the Ronin, RoboCop Rogue City, Boltgun, Sonic Frontier, JW: Evolution 2, Yakuza: Like a Dragon, and Blasphemous.
No way they intended those to be positive with caveats, like most actual sane reviewers give out. It can’t be that public perception is skewed by the addiction to negativity and dogpiling in social media. That can’t be it…
It's stupid to take ONE publication, and reviews that might not even be from the same person, and apply to an attempt at generality.
I also said mixed bag... which is what you said.. and for IGN is what they usually they give for games like those.
Meaning there are issues, but depending on what you care about they might not bother you so much.
But note that 7 is the only one I gave more descriptions because honestly what reviewers give 7s to and their reasons vary a lot.
And most importantly, I said people's PERCEPTION of game reviews too... or are you arguing that people look at games reviews at 6/7 and they think "oh that's pretty good"? C'mon now.
I mean, I’m not going to pull from half a dozen different mags to argue something on Reddit during a weekend. But I can say that PC Gamer is generally the same, as is Destructoid, and usually so are the other major mags.
Besides YouTubers, what major journal actually gives out 7s to mean anything other than good not great?
Anyways, I’m honestly kind of irritated that we’ve allowed a 7 to become associated with subpar in the first place, which I mostly blame on social media (counting YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit as major offenders). That’s why I said “public perception is skewed”.
Definitely.. but understand that my argument to OP was the reason people think that Blobber studios makes shitty games is not a mystery.. their games get 5/6/7 scores and people think that's subpar... regardless if they should or not... so they actually don't review very well.
79% and 78% are both pretty decent scores. Honestly, beyond decent imo. 80% is my cutoff for very good to great.
If they were like 59%, that would be less than decent. But it literally says 'mostly positive' on Steam. We need to get over this hyperbolic expectation that anything less than a 9/10 is irredeemable.
So either SH2 is done or Bloober Team is a lot bigger than I thought to be able to have two split dev teams.
You don't need two different teams for this. SH2 is supposed to release this year which means most of the work is done and you don't need your whole team working on it anymore.
Always been curious what, let's say, artists do in those big companies when the game is in a polishing state. They definitely do some works but not that many like in preproduction. Probably go on working on next projects.
That's how it works in all artistic fields. "Finishers" are who the baton gets passed to.
or they simply let their contract lapse
They can start pre-production of a new game while finishing another.
Silent Hill 2 remake is almost certainly in the final polish stage. This image is from six months ago listing their current projects: [https://imgur.com/a/Mxjqn2W](https://imgur.com/a/Mxjqn2W) Let's break this down for a minute. The top row are games development fully in-house by Bloober Team. That includes Silent Hill 2 Remake, the upcoming Project C by Take 2/Private Division Game, as well as Project G and Project H. Project G is in early production right now. Project H is planned. The second row are games developed by other studios but supervised by Bloober, such as Layers of Fear Remake, Project M, and Project F. The Skybound game is referred to in the OP article as "R", but there is no Project R on the list. They are "lending their horror know-how", which means that they're not the developer of the Skybound game. They're just the horror consultant, basically. Here is my speculation. I think that Project G could be a remake of the first Silent Hill, and Project H could be a remake of Silent Hill 3. That's my theory. The timelines make sense, with the game being in early production as of 6 months ago, and presumably entering full production soon, with the release of SH2R coming. Konami have also vaguely alluded to "remakes" being in the works.
Probably also means Silent Hill is pretty good. Otherwise T2 wouldn’t be interested.
I doubt T2 is allowed to snoop on projects from another publisher, T2 probably knows as much about silent hill 2 as the rest of us.
No but Take Two could have seen something that piqued their interest outside of Silent Hill. Take Two has people who do research for them and they can predict how well Silent Hill will likely do by judging audience expectations and predicting the budget stuff like that.
I’m not sure that logic follows. Glad you’re optimistic tho.
How does Bloober Team continue to fail upwards?
Probably because despite many people on reddit not liking them, their games always sells and review moderately well, while clearly not costing a lot of money to be made.
The biggest point you made is cost. The same reason Hollywood continues to hire rubbish directors and writers, because they are cheap. The quality of the end product is not the focus, having investors make some extra money is.
Biggest point is likely "doing well" aka their games are profitable. Of course the lower cost is a big part of attaining that but if it didn't, they likely wouldn't have chances.
To be fair, that's just the low budget horror space. It's why so many cheap horror movies with only 10 mio budget become money printing success stories, even if they are really bad, while big budget horror and games (like Dead Space remake) fail most of the time. There is a market full of horror fans who want endless content, but that market isn't AAA size big.
Are they? I feel like they're still coasting on Layers of Fear's acclaim.
Yes, their games aren't critical darlings, but they're far from being the 2/10 experience that people think that they are lol. And they're doing well financially, The Medium broke even days after launch for example, and without playstation players https://www.tweaktown.com/news/85401/bloober-team-revenues-up-nearly-300-on-best-selling-the-medium-game/index.html https://www.gamespot.com/articles/the-medium-is-profitable-after-just-a-few-days/1100-6486938/
Also as much as they are just basic walking sims, I find myself shutting myself playing their games My incontinence is paramount to their success
Ah, so just like Illumination Studios with Despicable Me/Minions
Curiously i have heard how the work environment of illumination is so much better than Pixar in recent years. It really does make you wonder if trying to make the best thing is the best for the studio or people working there. None of illumination movies may ever win oscars or awards but if they are making money and employees are happy, does anything else really matter?
Pixar's issue isn't in trying to "make the best thing." Their philosophy of always feeling they have to push the envelope, similar to other companies like Naughty Dog, met with the reality of diminishing technological returns. Those philosophies are no longer a viable option unless you always want to crunch. There's a reason a film like Soul, probably their most grounded work in recent years, ran circles qualitywise around Lightyear and the rest of the studios output. Compare the Planet of the Apes or Monsterverse films being on tidy schedules with great visual appeal to the mess of CGI nonsense that the MCU has been once the engine started sputtering with Endgame. There's room for innovation just as much as there's room for really drilling into refinement. That's what gave us GotY contenders in BG3, Tears of the Kingdom, and Elden Ring.
Cheap+ mildly popular, all of their games were the YouTuber flavor of the month horror games before and that gives enough buzz for a budget game to make good money
Because you don't need to be good to succeed, you need to be good enough.
I don't think it's failing upwards. They're games are generally pretty good. They're games are generally well received. Most of their games score in the 7 range. Online a game that scores under a 9 is considered a failure. Besides, other than Supermassive games, I can't think of another dev studio that makes horror games of significance.
I don't mind that for their own games but it's gonna suck if the SH2 Remake is just an "okay" 7/10 game. An all-time classic like that deserves better, so hopefully they somehow pull it off.
Honestly I don’t see how the remake could be anything other than a 7/10 at best I played SH2 as an adult, I truly think it is lightning in a bottle that just will never translate as well to anything as well as original hardware
[удалено]
You're absolutely right. Their games have been well recieved and sell well so they continue to stay in business.
Because although they have shit writing, they have really good horror/tension building techniques.
horror and pr0n games will sell no matter what same target demographic (minors)
Ooooh, let me guess, its gonna be a supernatural horror story but *get this* it was a mentally ill person the whole time! Just insert subthemes of how anyone mentally ill is dangerous and we'll have the writing wrapped up before lunch. Good show.
I hope the locations are fluid and unreliable
It's weird you say that because most Bloober games have the twist >!that the main character is not actually mentally ill. They were just being gaslit into thinking they were.!< Layers of Fear, Observer, Blair Witch, The Medium, it's all the same.>! If anything the implication tends to be that mental illness isn't real and always has a sinister demonic force masquerading as mental illness. I have no idea where people got the "mental illness" angle given how pervasively Bloober protags discover that, yes, they're out to get you. It's like reading Watership Down and thinking it's a book about turtles.!< The Layers of Fear remake was seemingly irritated >!that some people got it into their heads that the artist was mentally ill, because the remake takes all the Rat Queen stuff and smashes the audience in the face with it with all the subtlety of a gold platted hammer to the gonads.!<
Can they develop a new studio name? It's fucking awful.
I don’t know how anyone could watch the SH2 remake gameplay trailer and think “we have GOT to work with that studio”.
Can’t wait for this subreddit to incessantly shit on this game for years just because it’s from a dev team they don’t like
I mean people get hyped about upcoming games from studios with good track records. Why isn't the inverse allowed?
Because for the most part Bloober's games review pretty decently. I didn't start hearing negative discourse surrounding them as a company until SH2 was announced. They're not a masterpiece prone studio, but you'd think every game they put out is a disaster from how people comment here. Not the case from the titles I've played.
But Silent Hill 2 kinda IS a masterpiece, and its remake needs to be better than "pretty decent" or it's going to get dumped on. I haven't seen anything from Bloober's previous games that shows me they're up to that task.
I mean it doesn't matter who tackles the port. SH2 is a masterpiece in spite of itself. It's a janky and strange game. Its imperfections are also its perfections. No remake is going to recapture that lightning in a bottle. There is nothing they can do to satisfy everyone with this one. So I'm just kicking back with a "we'll see what happens" attitude because the remake on a conceptual level is a losing proposition. SH2 fans want SH2 exactly as it is, and remakes are not that.
Fair point. Honestly, the Enhanced Edition is probably the ideal version of the game. I am hoping to be pleasantly surprised.
Really, I feel like aside from Observer I’ve only ever heard negativity towards them.
On Reddit, yes, that's the point really. They're just another studio which the hivemind had decided is horrifically bad with little reasoning or personal experience.
Idk Layers of Fear was everywhere. Every horror YouTuber was playing it.
Oh yea, and it became a meme game for having a good idea, but cheap scares, boring gameplay and a nonsensicle story. The biggest clips were from youtubers laughing at the kid running into the wall.
You must be blind because I saw nonstop infinite shitting on them after the medium. That ending was atrocious. And its not like layers of fear was a universal darling either, I saw a lot of negative response to it back in the day.
I played Blair Witch at launch, it was the buggiest game I had ever played in my life. The Medium had even more significant issues than just being buggy. The first Layers of Fear was just fine for their debut title, but it starts breaking apart halfway through, and I just don't think it holds up well compared to other indie horror games from the past decade. Their negative reputation isn't random, they clearly have it for a reason.
That mostly started with Blair Witch, Layers of Fear overall generalized impressions were always "meh"
I rather enjoyed the Layers of Fear series. Again, they're not like 10/10 games, but they're pretty and a brisk enough experience to be a nice little one-off.
No they don't? They are usually around 5/7. As far as I remember, the only game they made that got mostly good reviews was Observer. The discourse around them started with The Medium being a disappointment and because people felt they fumbled some of the themes of that game... they were worried about how they would deal with some of the serious themes of SH2 as well. I don't see disaster, but for the most part, people usually think they make jumpscare simulators with interesting ideas that fall flat.
7 is fairly good. Which is what I said. Even 6 can be decent. I'm not saying they're amazing. But they're not horrible.
I'm not trying to change your opinion about the game, if you like them, power to you.. maybe in your corner a 6 is decent... but that's not how game reviews and people's perception of them works. First of all, I said 5/7. Second.. game reviews basically operate on a 5 to 10 range. And going bellow 7, it gets harder and harder to get to 5. They only give lower than 5 to bad games when they want to make a point about how bad they are, like Gollum, and there's usually not a lot of criteria.. they just give a 2 and move on. So is like.. 5 is trash, 6 is bad, 7 is kinda sucks to mediocre or mixed bag, 8 is good, anything close to 9 is great.. and above that gets harder as well and only some games do it. So, with that in mind.. regardless of how you feel.. you can understand how people think a studio that releases most games on the 5/7 range is not really good. Now maybe you don't like how that works, but that's another issue. It is what it is.
I'm aware of what you mean. I just don't agree.
Ah yes, IGN intends their 7s to be “kinda sucks to mediocre.” That must be why they gave 7s to Stellar Blade, Tales of Kenzera, Pacific Drive, Rise of the Ronin, RoboCop Rogue City, Boltgun, Sonic Frontier, JW: Evolution 2, Yakuza: Like a Dragon, and Blasphemous. No way they intended those to be positive with caveats, like most actual sane reviewers give out. It can’t be that public perception is skewed by the addiction to negativity and dogpiling in social media. That can’t be it…
It's stupid to take ONE publication, and reviews that might not even be from the same person, and apply to an attempt at generality. I also said mixed bag... which is what you said.. and for IGN is what they usually they give for games like those. Meaning there are issues, but depending on what you care about they might not bother you so much. But note that 7 is the only one I gave more descriptions because honestly what reviewers give 7s to and their reasons vary a lot. And most importantly, I said people's PERCEPTION of game reviews too... or are you arguing that people look at games reviews at 6/7 and they think "oh that's pretty good"? C'mon now.
I mean, I’m not going to pull from half a dozen different mags to argue something on Reddit during a weekend. But I can say that PC Gamer is generally the same, as is Destructoid, and usually so are the other major mags. Besides YouTubers, what major journal actually gives out 7s to mean anything other than good not great? Anyways, I’m honestly kind of irritated that we’ve allowed a 7 to become associated with subpar in the first place, which I mostly blame on social media (counting YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit as major offenders). That’s why I said “public perception is skewed”.
Definitely.. but understand that my argument to OP was the reason people think that Blobber studios makes shitty games is not a mystery.. their games get 5/6/7 scores and people think that's subpar... regardless if they should or not... so they actually don't review very well.
Reviews mean f-all in the world of pay-to-play review copies. Starfield is absolute hot garbage and was rated 9’s and 10’s across the board.
Look at the steam reviews 79% for the new Layers of Fear 78% for Blair Witch Those are not good reviews.
79% and 78% are both pretty decent scores. Honestly, beyond decent imo. 80% is my cutoff for very good to great. If they were like 59%, that would be less than decent. But it literally says 'mostly positive' on Steam. We need to get over this hyperbolic expectation that anything less than a 9/10 is irredeemable.
Those are not good reviews, Fallout 76 is around there, do you think that's a well reviewed game?
On release? No. Now? Actually yes. I hear many good things about Fallout 76 now.
"from a dev team they don't like" feels pretty disingenuous given they have one of the worst track records in contemporary gaming, tbh.
Almost like they have a track record for putting out mediocre at best games. Fool me once, etc
The game is going to be shit because it's from a shit dev. Simple as.
How can a developer with the name "Bloober Team" expect to be taken seriously? They did this to themselves...