Ashes Cricket 2013 cancelled AFTER realease, developer blames Unity for failure

BBC - Ashes Cricket 2013 game taken off sale
Gamespot - Ashes Cricket 2013 cancelled

"505 Games has announced that it has cancelled Ashes Cricket 2013, days after the title temporarily appeared for sale on Steam.

"The chosen developer, even with their many years of cricket game development experience, was unable to overcome the unexpected challenges that the chosen game engine threw up, even with multiple extensions to the development schedule. At the start of the project, 505 Games received all assurances from the developer that the engine was up to the task of creating a dynamic, cutting-edge cricket game for the modern age across multiple platforms, and unfortunately those assurances were found to be misplaced."

Gameplay videos:
IGN
GiantBomb

 

Far more complex projects have been made in Unity than a cricket game.
I don't believe the developer can blame the engine here, sounds like a lack of skills.

Would be interesting to hear what 'challenges' the engine threw at them, considering they had full control over their gameobjects.

 

well that looks like a peice of crap

 

Looks like a piece of crap to me, but I dont see how they could blame unity for bad AI, bad graphics, etc

2 years... for that turd

 

indeed it feels like they are using Unity as a scapegoat.

 

At the start of the project, I received all assurances from the hardware store that this hammer was up to the task of creating a dynamic, cutting-edge deck for my house, and unfortunately those assurances were found to be misplaced.

 

nailed it!

/self chuckle

 

Holy ****.

That was the first pun that made me laugh. Ever.

 

That's actually not the developer stating that but the game publisher that contracted the developer. That would suggest to nepotism was involved because the developer wasn't sufficiently trained for the task. Not that all nepotism leads to such outcomes.

I'd like to create a baseball game in Unity but it would be daunting; maybe next year.

 

Had to google nepotism.

bit of a long shot maybe... what makes you think that was the case?

 

I'd probably use that excuse too if I was a really crappy developer.

 

You've made my day sir.

On topic, the whole thing is bizarre. I guess it's better that they didn't release a broken game, but you would think somebody would have put on the brakes before it actually went on sale. Sounds like some bad communication to me.

And yes, if you can't make something with Unity, no other available engine is going to be more capable, and you certainly don't have the skill to write your own.

 

I don't religiously follow game development, but developers blaming an engine for their crappy game is pretty rare, right?

Seems like a really odd excuse to make, like the above analogy said, it's like a contractor saying "sorry for the lousy deck, it'd be awesome if I only had some better tools."

Regardless of whether their claims about Unity have any basis ( yeah right ), it's their job as a developer to select the right engine, and if none is available create or modify their own. In other words, blaming the engine they selected, even if the blame were deserved, is really really bush league.

 

A little investigation leads to an interesting trail. The developer Trickstar Games has produced a cricket video game in the past. Go to their website:

International Cricket 2010 (Click on "Games" in top menu.)

According to wikipedia, however, this game was developed with a partner - Codemasters

International Cricket 2010 on wikipedia

Question I have to ask, "Why did they switch engines?"

Why was 505games chosen by the ECB and Cricket Australia to publish the game? Was the option of another partnership of Codemasters and Trickstar not an option?

It is interesting to note that in 2010, Reliance Entertainment bought a 50% stake in Codemasters - originally a UK company - that was later increased to 60%. Reliance Entertainment is an Indian company - and of course India is a major cricket playing country. Do they now own the engine that worked in International Cricket 2010 ?

cheers, gryff

 

Yeah I found this too and its weird becuase watching a few gameplay videos on youtube of IC 2010 show it to be a very competent game, which begs the question why did their Unity version end up so bad? If you watch any of the videos for Ashes Cricket 2013 you can see that pretty much everything is bad, the environment are poor, the texturing is poor, the animation is poor, the AI and animation control is appalling, none which could really be blamed on the game engine.

Its hard to see where 2 years of development went into this and I have to wonder what actually happened in the studio. Can you imagine working on this game and seeing it released in this state, that must be gut wrenching.

However it does provide some laughs.

Edit:
Found an interesting thread about the game on a Cricket forum ( link ), where a representative from Trickstar games outlines problems they are having with the game and Unity. Citing memory issues (xbox) and 'new technology' as the problems ( link ) but also state in Aug 2013 ( link )

which is an interesting thing to say, though nothing listed really explains the poor AI and animation control (states, transitions etc). Unfortunately there are like 500 pages and this is on page 303, so far too much to read it all.

 

The awfulness of that game had nothing to do with Unity. It's a shame they're blaming Unity, but that's business.

 

Sheesh my AI does that kind of S*** before I even begin debugging it. What a trainwreck

 

To be honest I don't think its black and white as all that. A lot of people who are building bigger projects have posted about various issues (for example see the posts buy GameFoundry/Folk Tale team). There was recently some issue posted about Mecanim using a lot of memory and its not like an XBox 360 has much RAM.

As much as I am invested in and love Unity I'm still yet to see many console titles and I could quite easily see a developer buying in to a multi-platform pitch that UT gave them and then ending up dissappointed.

 

I know where your coming from and was sort of thinking the same thing, but the more I read about this the more it doesn't tie up. I know from experience doing a good 3d sport game with player controlled avatars and complex AI can be down right nasty to get right, so I can certainly empathize for any developer who has to build such a complex game. However the issues posted in the forums I linked to do not in any way explain the overall poor quality seen in the PC game at every level (just watch the videos).

I would agree on last gen consoles with limited memory that various issues could be exacerbated and it is indeed a little worrying that the console versions appeared to be pulled/canned even as the PC version was released, but again this has little to no bearing on the quality shown from the PC version. Even if Unity was to blame for not being able to get a working version on consoles ( not sure I believe that ) the version we see on PC's is simply very bad, so I think there were far more problems than simply the 'game engine' chosen.

 

Don't worry I'm doing my usual act of going against the flow I like grey and not just because it matches my hair.

Although maybe I misunderstood, is the PC version a demo (that may have been rushed out to meet a publisher milestone) or is it a release? In which case I have no legs left to stand on ... falls over.

 

noisecrime: I did not know whether to laugh or cry at some of the antics. One clip I saw had a fielder throw the ball into the crowd rather than to his wicketkeeper. Another clip had the wicketkeeper and one of the slip fielders (about 6 feet apart at the most) hurling the ball at each other.

And the big screenshots of the umpire - his feet slide when he rules Out or a four or whatever.

cheers, gryff

 

Ha, ha.
No I think its good to stand back, to try and be open and non-judgemental, its very easy to jump on and put the boot in (opps wrong sport).

As for the game its not a demo, it was released on Steam last week in this state, then pulled yesterday/today, with the publishers 505 Games giving refunds to everyone because its so bad.

What is really sad is that its getting a large amount of news coverage and the blame (from publisher/developer) is being put on the 'game engine' which is slowly being revealed as Unity. I've already read several posts in the cricket forum I linked to that already assoicates Unity with poor 'Android' games and this is not going to improve things.

Obvbiously this is simply what happens when uninformed public see a bad game and automatically assume its all <insert name here> game engine is capable of. However I wish Unity would do a little more to combat this. They do seem to be making steps in this direction, recently posting a video of games made with Unity, but I feel they could probably do much more.

Yeah its pretty bad, but very funny too. The GaintBomb link from the OP has a video review by some American's playing it, which is a whole different level of funny as they openingly admit to not knowing anything about the game, rules, terminology.

The umpire shots are really weird as its greenscreened (you can tell in the gaint Bomb video), which is really puzzling, as though they must have recorded footage of it to playback as video. Why they chose to do that instead of simply using the in game model is bizarre.

I'm beginning to think this might just surpass Big Rigs: Over the road racing as the worse game ever made.


Edit:
Ok the PlanetCricket forum is a wealth of embarrassing videos from the game, here's my new favorite

or maybe its this one

 

I don't think the blame can be solely thrown at the door of the developer, you can't build a house with a rubber hammer immaterial of personal skill level. There are numerous complaints about Unity in these forums. The CEO has stated Unity is not AAA game engine, there is a gap, but they are playing catch up. Personally having experienced trying to push the playstation to it's limits with Sony development kit back in the 0s, the engine under the hood does matter. I would not try to do a cutting edge game with Unity, not that it can't be made to look fantastic, but there is a lot more involved at the game engine level, and some tools are just not up to the job. The problem with Unity is one looks at the games it makes and they are fantastic so Unity gets lumped in with UDK/Cryengine/Frostbite and people always compare these and Unity is not the equivalent of any of those other 3. It's something on it's own.

 

I think the issue here is that even if Unity isn't up the the standard of the engines you mentioned, it is definitely capable of better than what is shown in the videos of this game.

 

Unity is more suited for this game than all those shooter engines you just described. What does Unity have to do with how god awful your AI is? The only benefit I see from those engines that they'd get is graphics and even that is a long stretch.

 

Well Unity is hardly a rubber hammer in this instance, and is quite possibly a better choice for this type of game than any of the other engines you mentioned (which are graphics powerhouses designed with much narrower focuses than Unity). You're right, we have no idea what was going on with the developer and this could just be the result of the best they could do in a bad situation, but those videos do pretty clearly show things being done badly that should be well within the grasp of Unity, and the various spokespeople involved aren't doing anyone any favours by pointing fingers at other people.

To be honest it doesn't look "bad" to me as much as it does "unfinished". People* are standing around laughing at this as if they believe the developers thought this was great. That's most likely not the case, and given the choice they'd most likely not have put something like this out. It's probably borne of tight budgets or schedules or it being one of multiple projects on the go at once or any one of a huge number of other things that could have taken a negative toll on development. The developers behind it probably didn't enjoy it one bit, probably aren't happy with what's been put out there, and probably don't appreciate being a laughing stock.

* Including other developers. Which suggests to me that some of you haven't experienced crunch, making you either extremely lucky or inexperienced.

 

This, to me, is kind of the final answer here. It may be possible that Unity could not have done what the needed. I don't really believe that based on the game, but that is not really the point. They should have done enough research before committing to a tech, or at least suck it up and admit they made a bad development choice.

Now, I cannot give specifics, but I can say we have experience with issue. A few years back we started to build a fairly huge project in Unity. It was based on a new tech that Unity had released, and it never really panned out to the level that they planned or intended. After a couple years and several million dollars, it was scrapped. (And Unity dropped that tech). Unity worked really close with our team as was helpful, but it was never capable of meeting our needs. It would have been easy to try to place the blame on Unity, since that tech didn't work. But it was ultimately our fault, because we bet on an unfinished tech. Optimism and expectations bit us in the ass.

 

I've kinda been bit with this before myself. It hasn't been with Unity per se, as the core product is pretty stable. But with some store addons, I sometimes found it difficult to make a good purchase decision. There were some products that received glowing reviews, but had showstopping bugs and strange design decisions. A few of them I had to stop using, but I wish I could have weeded them out sooner. On the flip side, some of these addons have improved. I guess that's what happens when you depend on unstable tech.

 

Is this flash you're talking about? Just curious.

 

Yup.

 

Generally speaking, such a failure should never have gone THAT far. Where is QA? Milestones check, debugging, beta testing, etc.

That said, it can't be black or white but most of the blame is on the devs. First rule of good trading: if you don't know what you're doing, don't do it (aka don't take the job or resign before pushing a train wreck that far).

 

Looks like they didn't do enough research and jumped into changing to Unity too quickly.

But anyways, why don't they just sell it as it is? Its worth $2-3 for the laugh.

 

Some interesting background stories

http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1rn13c/ashes_cricket_2013_cancelled_after_release/cdox0ds

 

WHO ARE THESE BACKWARD PEOPLE STILL PLAYING DIS GAME I NEVER HEARD OF CALLED CRICKET??????!! DO THEY CATCH CRICKET OR WHAT??

ITS AN AWEFUL GAME. PERIOD! I SAID IT!

You people need to start playing BASEBALL !!

 

Ok, show us examples of the AAA or even AA games floating about with smooth precision out there..? I've been trying to find some, I've even tried to make one and personally I know the AI is better than what's on show here. Do you have in depth personal experience of CryEngine and not necessarily UDK but Unreal engine? Because it doesn't seem you realise half the feature set's of them.

Unity isn't a AAA game development tool and neither does it seem it's meant to be. If TrickStar have the skill to pull off their previous titles like international Cricket 2010, JASF and Damage Inc. are you 100% sure without a shadow of a doubt it was all the developers fault (Not saying here a portion of it wasn't)? Because they got it right before..

Let's not just jump on the devs, Unity is an engine and has merit's in areas some of the big boys of the games industry doesn't.. In some area's it's very much lacking.

Two things I don't agree with about this scenario, releasing it before it's finished.. That just shouldn't happen and they should of done a small concept in more than one engine if they were switching to see what works best for them.

I respect that many people here love Unity and for many reasons I can't blame them, but let's not pretend it's the all encompassing swiss army knife of game creation. Because it's not, no engine is..

 

I think it's time for Unity as a company to make a stand and start to protect it's interests. Even the wikipedia page about this gamedev fiasco ends by making "a dysfunctional game engine" responsible for the mess

quote from the wiki page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashes_Cricket_2013

Please Unity , do something about this !

 

Judge again after you carefully watched the video s all over the web. This game apparently does not suck because of engine problems, but a total lack of production quality, QA and finalizing. The engine boundaries are nowhere involved in all this-....

 

This sounds somehow like what Silicone Knights said about Epic when "Too Human" tanked.

http://kotaku.com/5787413/this-is-g...for-legal-war-with-shooter-giant?tag=toohuman

 

I've seen quite a few of them and agree, why they released it in that sorry state is way beyond me.. All I'm saying is it might not be the dev's themselves, it seems more likely management issues and struggling with certain aspects of Unity. (If I was a betting man I'd put management issues high up there).

It looks like it was still in Alpha and they tried to fob it off as a finished game.

 

I've been following this story since the news broke. It's definitely not black and white. What I suspect has happened is similar to the experience we've had over the last 2.5 years. Due diligence during engine selection can only go on for so long, and it's understandable that Unity passed as it is generally good.

During development however, it's not uncommon to hit stumbling blocks with an engine that take time to investigate, assess, and resolve either with a fix, workaround or third party solution. Examples include engine bugs, and incomplete implementations. Thankfully for us we're an indie so we don't have harsh deadlines to meet - apart from those communicated by us to our community of players. However, this developer was in a publisher relationship, and publishers sometimes force bad decisions like releasing games too early.

Given time it's probable the developer could have made a great cricket game using Unity ( after all they have previously made acclaimed cricket games, assuming the same team exists and all the talent hasn't left ). Unfortunately they'll have agreed to deadlines and ran out of time to fix issues. It's a prime example of why developer-publisher relations are sometimes undesirable, and why changing engine comes with substantial commercial risk that should not be under-estimated.

The decision of when to publish the game was the publishers to make.
The decision to sign the publisher agreement and commit to a schedule was the developers to make.

 

The problems have nothing to do with the game engine itself.

- navigation and shortest distances computation across a straight plane
- path-finding for multiple NPCs
- AI for multiple players
- play (combat)

these are all logic problems and not related to any game engine. This is agnostic towards any game engines and the ability to implement this depends on the skill of the developer.


No game engine has this and fully built-in. Instead, you are asked to make your own implementations for this.

 

So what you're saying an engine is nothing to do with glitchy physics and poor rendering performance?

Also CryEngine has fully featured AI with sensory systems and locomotion, MNM and procedural flowgraph already built in. So I wouldn't say "No game engine has this and fully built-in. Instead, you are asked to make your own implementations for this."

Don't get me wrong, this is obviously nothing more than an alpha.. It shouldn't of been out on release, but I'm really interested in the actual technical difficulties the dev's encountered.

 

Well speaking generally I would have thought that the physics, AI, controller and animation systems are at the very heart of what makes a sports game work. If you try and do these things using unsuitable off-the-shelf system and without the right budget and high degree of developer skill in these areas, you end up with this sort of disgrace.

I would never commit up front to using Unity for this sort of project. I may very well use Unity to rapidly attempt to knock up a prototype, and during that attempt I would discover whether it stood a chance of being suitable to build the real thing.

On the publishing side of things, you have to be crazy to release something like this. Especially when its chock-full of brands that pay big money to sponsor the real-world version of the sport.

 

I have no idea what problems the developers have.


Usually when there is FPS drop, it is attributed to a script running too long or needs to be optimised, the culling is done wrong.

Physics bugs are usually due to developer not knowing what they are doing.
If Unity provides correct Physics results, it is the problem of the game developer adding extra scripts to that may affect the physics results.

 

Also this game was delayed for months, which leaves even less sympathy in my heart for those responsible. Someone with the right knowledge should have been able to get the AI working properly in that time, or at least get it to a point well beyond what the numerous videos show. Likewise for the bulk of the visual horrors.

Perhaps some Unity-related performance limitations would have left a few remaining issues, but it strikes me that what was put on display here is more about really bad use of built-in solutions, and people getting out of their depth quickly.

 

Did anyone try to get a CryEngine indy license? They just ignore you instead.

 

, yes they have.. Come on Joe, there are limitations in Unity as there are in any Engine in different areas having a pre-cycle render buffer wouldn't go amiss and a 64-Bit editor for a start.. It's not completely unfeasible they hit a wall. That all aside as I keep saying it's appalling they released a game in that state.

 

ROFL, that is really bad...

 

So outside of graphics and memory - What happened to all the Good code from their mentioned previous Good cricket game? Surely the AI only needed to be ported to c# .. as eskimojoe mentioned logic structures of this nature would be engine agnostic so something does not add up here... there is no excuse for what I see happening in these videos other than bad coding period!

 

The AI is terrible. That's not an engine problem. It's a code issue.