============================ *_IMPORTANT! Please Read for FAQ and Consulting Info!_* ============================ Hi all, thank you so much for watching! It means a lot that you would engage in this game design journey. Your viewership and Liking/Commenting on the video help a ton and I greatly appreciate each one of you! I try to Heart or respond to comments as much as I can. Please don't comment underneath this pinned comment since it's more difficult for me to see and respond to. This pinned comment is where I'll update with any corrections or FAQ. But first, here's some quick information on the new indie game design consulting that I'm now offering! Submit your game through our form on our website here ( gamesover.coffee/consulting ). The website includes free resources for indie devs, including this channel right here. We'll be expanding to assist as best as we can. Check out the front page of the channel for the consulting video playlist. Subscribe to the Games Over Coffee Consulting channel to keep up-to-date with more Design Frame content! ============================ *_FAQ_* ============================ *0. **_Prerequisite Mindset & Personal Experience_* ► There's nothing wrong with finding the game fun in your personal experience, but your enjoyment of something doesn't mean it is without flaw nor does it change objective design flaws. We can all agree that we want to see Steel Wool and the industry improve as they continue to make games. I provide the evidence and means to do so in the behind-the-scenes game design space (and much more in the next FNaF videos), and I hope you find value in that rather than a shallow reinforcement of your feelings. This does not mean that your personal experience is invalid. You are free to enjoy what you want. In fact, I very much love and appreciate hearing your personal experiences in the comments. In the case of Security Breach, it's clear cut where the enjoyment derives from, so don't allow branding to cause you to deceive yourself. If you truly care about FNaF, this video should be meaningful to you. I hold myself to a high standard and provide evidence and game design information in what I hope is in a digestible format. I am not always correct; I am human, and I am always learning. I welcome constructive feedback. I'm also happy to assist in clarifying concerns or questions, if I have the time. However, I don't accept dismissive or unsubstantiated comments. Also, interpreting others unfavorably is not constructive. Please treat everyone here with respect. Thank you for being awesome and I hope to see you around!
One thing that always frustrated me was the misuse of Gregory himself. Like Gregory is like what? 10? Imagine, instead of blocking off things with invisible walls and arbitrary security barriers, Gregory is to scared to go alone because freddy is hurt in this area. Like, instead of the barriers, the lights are out in that place and Gregory is to scared to go because he thinks Moon is in there and its dark (and kids are scared of the dark) so that way the player can't go into that area yet. It would be so easy to make the characters scary, Gregory is a child! Make the characters scary because the character you play has is scared! Instead of hiding from the animatronics because they teleport, have the screen darken and the characters breathe quicken as the animatronic approaches and you're stuck in place until you have to force Gregory to run. It would make the game scarier and encourage you to avoid the animatronics. You don't want to get stuck in place and you don't want the kid you're getting attached to throughout the game to get hurt so you avoid the animatronics. Steelwool refuses to use Gregory as any more than a vessel for the player when he could be so much MORE. you don't need a big pizzaplex when, in the mind of a child, EVERYTHING is ginormous. Especially when you're on your own. It would be so easy to make the game smaller and scarier but they refuse because they're just to cocky. Like, they're so caught up in the lore and the set design that they don't know how to utilize the very basic tools of storytelling. Latch on to the character and it makes everything much scarier.
I despise any author who, when interviewed about their work, gasses themselves up over how "ambitious" or "expansive" (or whatever other vague buzzword adjective) their project was. It's genuinely shocking seeing these interviews with Steel Wool, where the devs don't look even slightly concerned about the shoddy state of the game, and instead gush about how big the pizzaplex is. Insane. I wish more devs were humble and self-critical, even in the face of financial success.
I feel part of that is “PR speak” or “words for the shareholders”. Now, most of the time, lead devs (or lead workers in most industries really) are forced to say stuff that keeps the shareholders happy and keep/cause more potential consumers/investors to be interested, even if it’ll blow up in their face. The difference here is that Steel Wool (from my understanding) doesn’t have share holders (with only Scott being their investor for FNAF related stuff if I’m not mistake). They can *afford* to be honest about it’s poor progress and troubled development (maybe ask for a delay to redo the whole project), and look back on the project with regret. They’re *able* to be more transparent and open about things since they don’t have to worry about share holders withdrawing their funding. This kind of hints that Steel Wool might have/had internal issues, like something akin to toxic positivity. Considering there’s no way any dev wouldn’t feel at least a tinge of regret with the way SB turned out, especially with how “ambitious” they wanted it to be.
I think what did it in for me with this video was Scott's response trying to defend steel wool too. Like they made a bad product and a mess of his IP, if he isn't going to try to defend the IP he's worked so hard to build up then what does that tell us the fans? That Scott no longer cares enough about FNAF universe to ensure its quality?
Finally, someone includes Scott in this conversation. I'm tired of people idolizing him to the point where they ignore his contributions to SB development issues. Scott has a tendency to fixate on one thing at the time himself, so it shouldn't be a mystery why SB turned the way it did. He sees an issue and makes the next game focused around fixing it, but doesn't seem to care about the bigger picture. With SB everyone involved was so fixated on the game being big and impressive on the outside that they didn't bother making it an enjoyable experience. Which reminds me of how Scott treated Fnaf three. All visuals with gameplay leaving people disappointed and jumpscares being lackluster. Not to mention his history with giving the jobs to people he likes. Despite lack of quality in their work required for such projects. It's frustrating to see people put him on a pedestal. Showing off the clips, of him saying how he cares about quality or how Fnaf World taught him to never take people for granted. But if he really cared then why he gave away the rights to make plushies that looked worse than the bootleg ones? What about those graphic novels everyone laughed at and that inaccurate lore book? He handed the development of a big project to people who didn't have the experience and/or mindset to handle it. He is and always was a part of the problem. I'm quite aware we are all humans, we make mistakes. But for him, it's simply a pattern of behavior. He says one thing, and then does something contradictory. Just for others to quote him and blame all of his mess on an inexperienced team of devs. They are responsible, that's undeniable, but can we stop pretending like Scott didn't enable all of this? I wish I could see in him the stuff he says about himself, but it seems like he's manifesting making good decisions. And failing. I might be too harsh on him, but others coddled him enough over the years, so it should balance out. People seem to bash Steel Wool with no issue. But the respect for Scott seems to shield him from the criticism. I'm so invested into all of this mainly because I grew up on these games. I had a similar mindset. But ironically enough after hours of watching retrospectives, essays, revisiting my own memory and looking stuff up, suddenly I cannot take these interviews with him seriously. It sounds nice on paper, but it is not reflected in reality. I would be surprised if ONE person decided to read all that. If you do exist kind stranger, I wish you a nice day~~ (And if you like Scott more power to you, I'm just tired of pretending like he's not part of the puzzle)
Agree, especially after hearing about the weird Burntrap thing! Like, did he never think to tell someone “hey, that’s not really what I meant.” Or don’t tell them to include it if you are going to be vague about what it means
@DesignFrameCaseStudies Easy, make her spawn in EVERY area Gregory goes in, upgrade her AI so she's not always aware of where you are, but your overall location. Think the Xenomorph from Alien Isolation. Give her a knife, she's meant to be a killer, give her more voice lines, give her more abilities other than just walking (there are unused animations of her walking in pretty creepy ways as well as crouching, suggesting she could go inside vents with gregory). The game would still be crap, but Vanny would be respected.
Valve recently released a documentary and dev commentary for Half-Life 2, one of the most influential games of its time that set the bar for how games should be -at minimum-. Even then, they had some misgivings about their design decisions, even poking fun at themselves. Robin Walker referred to one questionable moment as "magical bullshit." Most players wouldn't even have noticed, but by his admission, the devs still weren't proud of it. Further ahead, you find a mortar that had been giving you hell a few maps back. Too bad you can't fire it yourself... which a dev admitted was a missed opportunity. They even address a failed attempt at preventing you from trying to go down a slide in a playground; they couldn't get the physics for it right, so they broke the ladder. But you can just climb up the slide itself, and a dev conceded that, as is often the case, we the players got the last laugh on them. Steel Wool have done no such introspection. If they have, they refuse to publicly admit it. It really worries me for their future projects. I hope they can step outside their echo chamber long enough to realize that the aggrieved among us (most of us, anyway) are more frustrated than anything else. The game screams "fizzled potential." They flew too close to the sun. FazFriends has a bunch of videos showcasing the amazing attention to detail they had, which only dials up the frustration. I love everything about Security Breach, EXCEPT the gameplay and story. I haven't played it myself, but I've seen enough to understand what I'd be getting myself into. I just hope they can partner up with some devs who know what they're doing, that way the artists can do what they do best while still crafting a worthwhile gameplay experience. I don't know what to expect, but we'll have to see. It's up to them to turn things around.
Hell, even the thing described as "magical bullshit" only happens under the specific circumstance, where you manage to kill the two miniboss enemies in the area before one of them gets a chance to shoot at a gas tanker (which only happens when the total health of the two enemies is low); causing it to explode. If you do that, and it is difficult (but I have managed to do it myself), the gas tanker just explodes on its own. I'm not sure if the Valve devs missed something or not before recording that developer commentary line given its kind of misleading phrasing, but if they didn't, that's one hell of a commitment to standards.
@@Gulliblepikmin At least it's more justifiable "magical bullshit" than teleporting animatronics, right? The exploding gas tanker falls within the realm of plausible deniability at worst. Gigamonty? Not so much.
The comedy bot being confirmed will always be hilarious to me. I just assumed its broken routine was intentional, so hearing that it actually does have jokes is ironically less funny to me.
I was playing this with my child (for my child lol) and even if it was completely bug free (it absolutely isn’t) it is the epitome of a rotten foundation. It was frustrating boring and confusing from the jump. But my boy loved the characters so much I kept slogging for him. I was genuinely dumbfounded when Design Frame showed the quote saying Steel Wool was “content with the game in its current state” I had to take multiple breaks despite my son’s egging on bc I would be killed by animatronics who could not detect me in my hiding spot but never left and then lost over half an hour of progress. TBH I got the escape ending and uninstalled lol. When he asks for a revisit I tell him he can play it himself lol.
Yes! That's the exact experience that's typical in the game if people weren't so blinded by the branding! But some just don't know any better, so I think it's important to expect more than slop from our games, especially a huge franchise. Thanks for sharing :)
i was learning a lot about project management for an IT class and they always talk about scope creep and how it's one of the main causes of project failures and such, but i never understood its significance and how horrible it could be until you showcased it in this case study, very informational and truly what a nightmare scenario for a project
I remember watching Markiplier play Security Breach. For context, his FNAF videos have always consistently made me laugh since 2014. This one though…he looked broken by the end of it. His 2 hour livestream where Chica spawned on top of him and killed him was just the icing on the cake. When I watched him play Ruin, he seemed to enjoy it more than the main game which made me happy. I don’t have much hope but I hope someone at Steel Wool sees this video and takes all the criticisms to heart. I think what worked for Ruin was that it was a smaller experience than the main game which meant that the atmosphere could be creepy.
For me, favorite SB experience would still be Phisnom. Dude was so excited and ended up ranting in Spanish with only music man section bringing him any thrill and joy
@Brite-um2tq I mean it kinda is, it's definitely way more enjoyable than base SB, but still, Alien Isolation and Dead Space, two games that Ruin reminded me of, do what Ruin tried to do significantly better, and Isolation is a good comparison to base SB, as base SB reminded me a lot of Alien Isolation, both games were their respective studios first attempt at that kind of game, with the Creative Assembly group working on the Total War game series and Steel Wool being a VR studio, but the reason Phil got canceled was not due to his opinion of Ruin, that is factually incorrect, he was canceled due to how he handled what happened afterwards, joking about getting gore sent to him instead of a minor, who couldn't respectfully disagree with Phil's opinion on Ruin, and instead had to be a whiny toddler and say, "When FNAF+ comes out I'm gonna call it shit even if it's not"
@@rodimusmagnus5586 Dude he encouraged his fans to mob the kid with death threats, that and his extreme unprofessionalism and making a general ass of himself whilst hiding from criticism behind his toxic "persona". I used to watch his stuff cuz I agreed with his take on SB but you have to admit man's childish as all hell.
"They worked too hard on the wrong things" is a great single sentence summary of my feelings on the game. I'm very willing to forgive games being weird or jank if I can see the ambition, and Security Breach has ambition in spades. It's just clear that this studio, as passionate as they were and as many genuinely good ideas as they have, wasn't ready to make this kind of project. I thought some of the writing in the side-story with the human staff being increasingly concerned that they're being replaced by robots was genuinely a fantastic place for the series to go. The fear of being replaced is uniquely applicable to both humans and robots in a way that could create some really neat places for the story to go. I think that given (a fucking significant amount of) time, Steel Wool is capable of making really good FNAF content. They've just got some introspection to be doing.
The pizzaplex is actually an amazing design and I agree with Steel Wool that its a place I would want to go... just not in a videogame. I've had more fun bumming around in security breach vrchat worlds than playing the actual game.
@Wootmaster For sure! The only argument that matters for a game is that the Pizzaplex sucks for a game and gameplay and for a project scope. Nothing was done with it in the game! At least VR Chat got some use out of it 🤣
It's a wonderful design visually and feels like they thought about what people would want in a real attraction - but the size and bloat ruined it as a game environment, between the useless map, camera issues, and overall emptiness of the environments.
It truly boggles my mind why Scott wanted a VR studio to make a free roam game, and when they made it too big, why the fuck did he not say, “stop this” Edit: also note how the best fnaf game since the Steel Wool era begun wasn’t created by Steel Wool, with that game being Into The Pit.
If I had to make a genuine guess outside of "Scott is mishandling the franchise", because that's an obvious thing, I think he probably thought that VR and free roam is similar in terms of game development. As far as I'm aware, Scott mostly uses Clickteam for game development, so he probably doesn't have a whole lot of experience in developing a fully 3D free roam game or VR game. So, he probably assumed that since both VR and free roam 3D both use 3D models, that the creation and development of both types of games must be similar enough that experience in one means experience in the other. Idk I might just be stupid though.
It feels like Steel Wool has just listened to all the blind positivity from fnaf fans that just enjoy anything labeled fnaf, and not a single bit of the people giving harsh (but VERY needed) criticism. Great job on this video, editing and all.
I mean no right? Ruin bought security breach from god awful to like a decently mid experience. And help wanted 2 was consistently praised. From what I've heard the newly announced mimic game demo at PAX seemed to not be terrible either. I think it's pretty clear they are listening to feedback, they just don't seem to want to admit fault in public interviews lol.
@@DetectiveYuki You're not wrong but Ruin didn't change anything about Security Breach aside from maybe a few bug fixes. It's effectively it's own, new experience.
As a FNAF fan I gotta say FNAF fans will faen over jingling keys all the time... The movie being the best example with people saying it was perfect or near perfect...
@@KumihoMahao The movie was the embodiment of what I hate in this franchise and I don't trust people who had a good time watching it. Especially since most people who liked it were screaming in union any time reference to a game was on the screen. "You had too many expectations so no wonder you didn't like it". I had none, I came with clear head. And I still think it's a boring and confusing, on many levels. Having all that knowledge about the games makes it even harder to understand. Because they share names and appearances of people who they are clearly not. "It feels like any time something fnaf-related comes out it's another universe." - Me (Right now) I think Scott forgotten that his parodies of future projects (Like Fnaf 57 Freddy in Space) were not supposed to be predictions. At this rate we might get a multiverse movie in a few years. IMAGINE - This time Afton is the kid. But the actor is the same so it's a middle-aged man in primary school. And during lunch he goes to Freddy Fazzber's cafeteria. Then he jumps into a ball pit that shows him all the lore Scott scrapped just to piss off MatPat... Then music man is an actual man, a dj school hired for a school dance. And all other students are Endos. And at the end we learn that the killings were the friends we made along the way. Also there are Aliens because we already made ghosts science and also the killer is a computer virus and can control animatronics so why shouldn't there be aliens? If that ever comes true I will sue Scott since he obviously stole this idea from me. You are my witness KumihoMahao
Seen some people call this meanspirited, I mean i guess some points in the video with the meme clips could be considered that, but everything else, no. At some point you have to call Steelwool out for this shit and drag them a little bit. They got peoples money and put out a bad product, and then had the audacity to say they were content with the changes they made, when in reality they hardly made the game any better bug wise. It's laziness and lack of transparency
I remember DJ Sterf recalling how he was brought on to play test the dlc. I believe he recalled that the reactions to his feed back were always mildly hostile, as if he was attacking the devs directly by pointing out basic bugs and glitches.
@DesignFrameCaseStudies I might be misremembering what he said, but on his RUIN chapter 2 video at 38:22 he talks about his experience being a QA tester and how he was brought on. He may have just been saying in general of what typically happens as a QA tester however.
@@tancoat1346 I watched the clip in question - his comment was saying that other people he's worked with have been aggressive towards him in terms of QA, but Steel Wool was particularly charitable to him with his involvement.
@@artydoesstuff1534 That's true, but I find it very interesting how everyone who worked with steel wool have only the highest opinions of them despite the state of the game they created. Just as well, in that clip Sterf remarks on how two QA studios on top of him joined in to bug test the DLC with him recalling over 2200 bugs found by him alone. But even then the DLC much less the base game was incredibly buggy. Though I was wrong about what was stated in the clip, I do believe the clip itself holds significance.
@@tancoat1346 I think its because Steel Wool is good at like human interaction and just being personable. So its hard to hate them even if their products are less than stellar because if you worked with the people you know them on a human level. Its not like with us. We know theyre people, but we have no emotional or social connection with them. We only know what they present to us with interviews, what products they created and sold. It is a skill you have to learn to be able to make a social connection and still be able to bluntly critique a work. Personally, Ive only ever really seen it be taught in art subjects. I could be wrong, but I havent seen other subjects in school or other fields focus on teaching that skill to kids or students
It feels like a Greek tragedy, such a terrible mismatch of skillset. They're brilliant artists who have created arguably some of the best (or at least, most popular) character designs for FNAF in the Glamrocks and couldn't follow through on making a game that people want to play. The pizzaplex has a brilliant design visually, but is a broken slog in execution, and the fact that they can't or won't see that feels like some sort of tragic curse.
Remember aspiring artists! Each area needs their own specific skills and mindsets. Being a background artist for an animated movie is very different to being a level designer!
even if I'm not a game designer yet, this video gave me a bit of perspective on how mismanaged scope can consume a project and how arrogance/ignorance can kill it for good. definitely a principle I want to keep in mind for my future endeavours.
I gotta be real with myself,I will probably never play any game in the franchise,but I will still devour this 2 hour essay as I have gotten more enjoyment from fnaf lore theories and game analysis than I think I could have ever gained actually playing the games.
The game just feels unrealistic in size and that's my biggest gripe with it. Second gripe is that they don't justify the size. You're running through an area filled with stuff but it's still empty and there's nothing to do in it. In skyrim you'll never enter an area without having many many things to do in it, in this game you struggle to find one thing to do in it.
4:44 NOOOOOOO they fell into the classic creative art trap! Even in scriptwriting you are not supposed to get too attached to any one idea for risk of bloat, pacing issues etc. Edit: I have a sneaking suspicion they didn’t do a Game Design Doc….
Fantastic investigative piece. I felt I had to comment just to respectfully disagree with a few comments I saw saying the tone of your video was too mean spirited and/or condescending. Respect does not mean speaking softly and comfortingly like teaching a child. These are grown professionals that were handed one of the most profitable IPs of our time, put out a completely unacceptable product and are in full blown denial of it. CD Projekt Red had a full blown campaign launched against them for Cyberpunk 2077. I do not think large parts of that backlash were constructive in the slightest but CDR learned something, patched the hell of the game, then came back with an amazing piece of DLC. That shows what can happens when fans push studios to acknowledge and reflect on their mistakes. I understand that the tone of this video might be too much for some but I just wanted to throw my two cents out and say it was perfect. The Fnaf community seems so creepily insular and cliquey. This blunt honestly is desperately needed in my view.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that he's being disrespectful or condescending, more than some parts of this video are reminiscent of that old RUclips rant review style which can detract from the actual criticism. It's a fine line to walk.
As one of the people who made one of those comments, I don't care about being disrespectful, I've never played a FNaF game and have no connection to the franchise, and I'll gladly admit it's fun to see someone dunk on an awful bit of media. My concern is that it gives incredibly mixed signals a) tear apart a game and it's devs but also b) have a disclaimer saying all of this is just for the benefit of the devs and c) promote a games consultancy service alongside it If the point of the video is to be a case study, I would expect to see discussion of both good and bad parts of the game (as far as I can tell the only positive mentioned was SW's passion for the game, nothing about a mechanic or design element they liked). If the video is specifically about scope creep, I would expect it to be far more trimmed down and structured around that. If it's about the bugs, sure, just focus on those. If it's about their games consultancy skills, tell me _how you_ would fix an issue, not just that it exists, I read their website and it explicitly stated on it "we don't think there's such a thing as a bad mechanic", but the video is just criticism of the negatives without any of that positivity or empathy they suggest elsewhere. My issue isn't _just_ that it's a mean video, my issue is that it's a _pointlessly_ negative video, that seems to want to promote positive aspects in game design, yet doesn't take any steps in that direction. As stated before, I'm not a FNaF fan, and I've actually really enjoyed previous design frame videos (I've been subscribed since the original SB video and greatly enjoyed the cuphead ones), this isn't me trying to defend anything. I also don't think this video is awful, it makes some genuinely great points about design scope and knowing your limits. I just think the tone of the video is at serious odds with both its stated goal and previous works on the channel.
Thank you for mentioning Cyberpunk 2077's launch against SB's. It was FASCINATING being a fan of both IPs during each launch- the fandoms behaved completely differently, and SB was just as broken and unplayable as Cyberpunk. It was like talking to a brick wall on either side when trying to either preach that CDPR *was getting better* and cyberpunk was playable now, or that Steel Wool was behaving inexcusably in the face of just how broken their game was.
Security Breach was fucking detrimental to FNAF as a whole dude. This was supposed to be *the* breakout fnaf game that people who had no idea what FNaF was would get their first impressions of, and we got... this. The writing was on the wall when Scott made that blog post referring to the game's development as "adding more and more layers to a cake". What a wasted opportunity at every level. Not even RUIN was any better.
An opinion of mine that I think kinda delves more into lore than gameplay (depends on the team really) but i genuinely think there was no saving this game. The inherent premise of it being some gigantic pizzaplex is fundamentally flawed, and imo very unsuitable for FNaF as an IP. I don't understand why they didn't just take inspiration from the RE7+ formula. I think that would have worked fantastic for a big budget, free-roam FNaF game.
This game should've been a brand new reboot rather than a continuation of the very well wrapped up OG canon. Wtf were Scott and Steel Wool thinking when writing this thing?
Nothing about the modern lore messes with the OG lore that badly? Afton's still dead, the MCI and all his victims are all still dead likely, Mike and Henry are still dead- There's literally only just a few overlaps, like with the presence of the FFPS pizzeria, the remains of old animatronics in the Tangle, return of characters like Candy Cadet, old FNAF games having their events represented in the indie games ad FNAF VR in universe, and a few more. Like I don't get the statement anymore? It effectively IS almost a reboot/new story at this point
@@anorak3334 It can't be a reboot AND a continuation - it can only be one or the other. A reboot is something entirely different. Different lore, different characters, different universe. A continuation is just, well, a story continued. They aren't the same. You can't have both. You can't have a half-and-half. From a storytelling perspective... Yes, Security Breach at worst does the original lore an injustice, and at best is completely meaningless. When working with an IP that already exists, you can't have your cake and eat it too. Simply put. It's possible to make a continuation with an all-new setting and cast, but it *has* to be relevant. It *has* to be of substance to the core foundation of the series. It can have a different story, but the themes and narratives *have* to relate to what has already been established. I mean, look at literally anything SpiderMan related from the past 2 decades - different takes on the same characters and the same story. That is a reboot. Now imagine if instead of going the multiverse route, storytellers tried to convince us that, actually, all of these Spidermen exist in the same world, just at slightly different times! That is what Security Breach tried to do. It gave us a new setting and new characters and a lore that does not relate to the previous games at all but then chickened out the last minute and tried to tie it into the rest of the canon, so it's own detriment. There was no point in it - they didn't NEED to do it - so why do it? FNAF at its core is about A serial killer targeting kids where they were meant to be safest; said kids haunting the establishments; enacting revenge on their killer. That's it. FNAF 1 establishes this. FNAF 2 adds to this through the minigames, mostly. FNAF 3 adds to this through minigames, and through making the murderer a primary threat/antagonist. FNAF 4 adds to this through minigames, and through allowing us to play as a vital main character in the canon lore. Sister Location adds to this by giving us further insight into the murderer and his family. Pizza Simulator adds to this by, quiet literally, giving us an ending to the story and it's characters. And then Security Breach is just... There. Pointless. In a limbo. It doesn't add ANYTHING. And yet, for some godawful reason, it tries to tie itself in as if it does. It fails to establish its own core narratives because it wants to hitch off of that of the previous games, when even with that context in mind, Security Breach's story honestly makes NO SENSE! You can't make a half-reboot half-continuation that's only relevant when its convenient, that's the kind of writing I can forgive out of a 12 year old fanfic writer, not a $50 console game with an adult team behind it.
Security Breach COULD have been a good addition to the canon lore had it actually stuck to a simple script of Vanny being a copycat of Afton and the primary antagonist of the game - no crazy virus robot BS necessary, no pointless hidden pizzarias or blobs, just back to the core of the series: a serial killer, innocent kids, and some haywire animatronics. That's literally all we needed.
@@puppiekit These statements make no fucking sense. No, the spider-man comparison doesn't make sense, since when the hell was it the same as trying to say all continuities of something are in the same universe? This is nowhere near the same, it's still in the same universe, but it's not trying to tell the literal exact same fucking story. The most that it connects is with some overlaps here and there, and that's it, (FFPS pizzeria under the Pizzaplex, obvious main animatronic characters, candy cadet and helpy, the Mimic copying Afton (for like...four games, three if we're not counting AR), the indie games, whatever's going on with the character of Nightmarionne, old animatronic parts in the Tangle, and the bonnie-mask bully from FNAF 4) Saying that THOSE somehow are proof of this statement of yours is bullshit, (we literally also have Vanny/Vanessa, Gregory/GGY, the Mimic, Cassie, Roxy, Monty, whoever it's likely implying is behind FE now, etc) No it did not chicken out of shit, literally every single other modern FNAF product aside from SB has been an improvement in comparison to it. Which is also another good point, why'd you only ever bring up SB when talking about the story? Why didn't you mention, why'd you oh so conveniently leave out, HW1, AR (in terms of really only the emails), Ruin, HW2, the upcoming SOTM game (which we can prolly already tell a lot about), ITP- It's funny, people like you always only ever seem to ention SB's story specifically when talking about the new story, and then NOTHING ELSE. Why is that exactly? No it isn't in a limbo, literally all the other fucking modern FNAF games are there around it. So moral of the story; Shut the fuck up, and stop trying to use one singular game that came out three years ago to try and prove a point about the modern story, even though the fucking story itself has already moved on. It is VERY obvious, when people like you clearly just purely nowadays base your whole view of modern FNAF off of SB, and that's it, and I don't what you seriously expect to gain from that. You just look fucking retarded, because you act like one thing that almost every other person that's not also doing that, has moved on from, is somehow still relevant and at that representative of the whole lore??
I like that you're not letting Scott off the hook. He's 100% complicit in this. That being said, I think he sort of admitted the game is bad? In the interview he said that they WANTED to make a good product which implies he doesn't consider it a good product.
Maybe in a weirdly roundabout way? But the quote I used is pretty overwhelming and clear-cut, you know? Yeah he recognized it went wrong, but I got the impression he was more referring to the story and covid. He's just as willingly unaware as Steel Wool and it's definitely not okay :)
@DesignFrameCaseStudies you make a good point for sure. I think the #1 problem in the games and movie industries is megalomania. Everything has to be the biggest thing ever and cost hundreds of millions of dollars and also appeal to everyone which makes it appeal to no one.
The big takeaway I'm getting from this boils down to the joke "how many therapists does it take to change a lightbulb? One, but the lightbulb has to want to change" Until Steel Wool recognizes the issues with the games they've created, I firmly believe nothing will change, as sad to say as that is. The "am I so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong!" shtick is EXACTLY what doomed Concord, and I can only pray Steel Wool can take a step back and look at themselves in the mirror before they suffer the same fate as Firewalk.
The whole "saves are disabled to increase difficulty" debacle really is some arcade-era thinking. Dark Souls is famous and infamous for its difficulty, even though it saves your game almost constantly (which even contributes to the difficulty in some aspects - you can't easily save-scum your level-up choices, for example). Eschewing saving can be a nice self-imposed challenge, but not every challenge can be a nice requirement.
I think it's even more insane than that, because really old games mostly didn't include saves because otherwise the game would be completed quickly, especially when cartridge space was so tiny and a single game was expected to last. So beating the game was the testament of mastery, sort of like modern day roguelites in a sense, except roguelites often include metaprogression and procedural generation to add short-term fresh experiences on top of the long-term mastery. SW has no reason to engage with that line of thinking whatsoever.
As an aspiring dev slowly working on my very first game, this is honestly a great dissertation and example of all the stuff I should not do with my project
The Passion section was interesting because regardless of the type of person he is, Phisnom was cooking. Sws overplayed their hand because they got hype from Help Wanted. I didnt like that Dawko was glazing so hard for SWS at that time, which im sure he felt he had to because he was so deep into the community.
Phisnom is the GOAT. All the other RUclipsrs have a financial stake in maintaining the facade of this franchise always being perfect because they have merch collabs with it. They are just shills at this point, sadly. The funny thing is they don't realize that ignoring the problems just means this series is gonna keep getting worse, they think ignoring the issues will help.
@@Korra228Phil might be a bit of a moron (I'll never forget his insanely stupid RoN take), but I'll give him this, he ain't no shill and he ain't afraid to speak his mind. There is something quite admirable about that, for better and for worse.
I loved security breach solely because of how much love and passion steel wool had for this, they just couldn’t do what they wanted to. Over ambition with too big of a scope. The pizzaplex is a phenomenal location with so much love and care but they couldn’t do it. It just makes me upset when some people just shit on steel wool like they had no love because this game just BLEEDS passion. Also glad you used a lot of clips from Phil’s playthrough because this game started a domino effect that led to him losing his job for the fanverse initiative
Yeah, that's why I wanted to mention their passion, since at the same time, there's evidence pointing to a lack of care and laziness. It's a strange dichotomy. There's just so much wrong that it's overwhelming. Their passion can be seen, but it's covered up by mounds of their own doing. Any true leader who's a bit familiar with media projects would've seen it coming a mile away.
I agree that they worked too hard on the wrong things Feels weird for me, when the gameplay experience is awful and the plot is shallow, and I look around and see all of the detail that's behind the Pizzaplex, I get mad because the atention to detail is in the wrong place
Thing is, the characters roaming the pizzaplex with increasingly more dificult mechanics as they get damaged, as you use some tools, limited battery freddy and the Faz cameras sounds amazing But the pizzaplex is so big you would never encounter them... So they added the teleport, rendering the cameras inconsequential, thats why noone uses them In conclusion, this game would honestly be incredible if the pizzaplex was smaller, no need to teleport, the pathfinding would have a much easier time to navigate, you would even encounter Vanny (yes, she roams the pizzaplex too) Imagine just a (much) smaller hub, a character specific area to introduce new mechanics that the character can usilize, and you too (kitchen for chica, use pizzas and staffbots; monty golf for Monty, the croc distractiona, walkways monty can hop between but not you, and so on) Then after each area, their mechanics change, Monty is more agressive and smaller, harder to track, maybe can crawl on small places like you, Chica is harder to hear and locate cuz of her voice, maybe doesnt get distracted as easier, and Roxy is blind, easier to distract but more agressive and cant be stunned Staffbots could just allert the animatronics instead of teleporting
I feel like 10 years from now this game will be old enough for hobbyists to completely overhaul into a completely functional game PLUS reimplement all the cut content. We've seen it done before.
Maybe? The overhaul would be creating a brand new game from scratch, and that just wouldn't work with how the Pizzaplex is currently built. It might be possible with a huge team and several years, but no one would be dumb enough to go to that extent for free. Maybe someone will create their own game that's inspired but within a manageable scope and level. And the gameplay itself would need built from the ground up. Very little is salvageable.
This is already happening. A team are making Five Nights at Freddy’s Security Breach: Blast to the past, which is adding in a lot of cut content, new storyline stuff, overhauled graphics and UI, overhauled gameplay and more
@Owen01 I'd be curious as to how they handle it. I saw their teaser of the Daycare rework and it had some improvements but still some issues I noticed. But I don't think it's intended to be the full rework that the game requires.
@@DesignFrameCaseStudiesYea this screams Cyberpunk. Game is fundamentally flawed from the complete ground up. Nothing short of a complete start from scratch could save SB. I loved Phantom Liberty but people glaze and shill Cyberpunk as if it still isn't devoid of content and features for an RPG. Exact same issue as SB. Overscoped. Except CDPR actually has proper game devs so at least the main story missions are fantastic albiet devoid of any branching
With Security Breach I sorta saw it as this rag tag bunch of indie devs who got in over their heads, admirable but ambitious underdogs, but I'd never heard the interviews included in this video and it really changed my perspective. There's a certain level of seemingly selective ignorance to this entire thing that is really difficult to watch coming from the highest players in the studio and I think surrounding yourself with only 'yes men' type of people who live and breathe the fandom uncritically is not going to actually help anything get any better. There are clearly very talented people involved in the making of this game, but that is not enough. I say that with the utmost gentleness possible and as someone who genuinely wanted to see this studio knock it out of the park.
I truly believe that the biggest problem with this game is its map size and all other problems would have disappeared if it weren't that big. It simply doesn't need to be this big at all. And if they really needed to do an entire mall for it, they should have made it an actual mall and not this amphitheater - factory - studio amalgamation with Old Aperture - type underground section.
I think the gameplay is a big issue too, but the map is certainly the root cause. It's difficult to design gameplay and levels in a space that doesn't really support it. Thanks for watching! :)
I love how the tone of this video is very different to the first one. This one has this lowkey "It's been two years, I've had it with your nonsense Steel Wool." vibe to it and I love it. It's definitely earned.
EDITED. something that isn't talked nearly enough about since the fanbase is 95% casuals and kids are the technical aspects of the game. it's terrible. just terrible. they're completely incompetent. 1. you can't choose resolutions above 1440p when set to fullscreen. workaround: set to borderless fullscreen. the game will set itself to the windows resolution...but still won't show the correct resolution in the settings menu. 2. raytracing is unplayable on a 4090. fps are below 20fps and even below 10fps no matter the resolution. they didn't even try fixing the implementation. workaround: use dlss. duh. 3. the game either doesn't use or uses a very bad raytracing denoiser. the noise burns your eyes out. workaround: use dlss as a makeshift denoiser. 4. despite me mailing them multiple times they still didn't fix the broken dlss implementation. the settings are mismatched and i found that out via noticing strange fps and then proving my suspicion via checking nvidia's dlss indicator overlay. workaround: choosing dlss balanced gives you dlss quality. performance and quality give you balanced and the performance setting doesn't exist in the game. 5. they never updated the stoneage dlss dll. workaround: do it manually. EDIT: 6: the game has fps black holes. looking at and/or standing in front of specific things makes the fps fall off a cliff and the frametimes graph freak out. workaround: looking/going away fixes the fps. a good example for this is the broken bot at the start of ruin giving you the flashlight. i also dmed you the list on twitter.
I thought I already replied but not sure what happened to it. I'm planning on mentioning a couple technical stuff next video, so I may use your comment as well! The Ruin frame black hole is also interesting. I'd like to mention that in the Ruin video I think. It's very strange...
@DesignFrameCaseStudies i deleted the old comment and reposted the edited one. were you able to reproduce one of those fps black holes? if yes, did you also see the frametime graph freaking out? for example via msi afterburner's overlay.
@@roflcopter3625 I haven't tried yet. I'll try it as soon as I record more Ruin stuff. It'd be a good idea if I tracked the frames of a game that didn't do that as well, for comparison. I think that'd be interesting.
I used to love the story of fnaf and was always excited to see what weird wacky place it'd go next. I didn't even mind the strange science fiction direction the series went in after Sister Location since I was mostly following the series for the camp that was treated overly seriously. Nothing about the nonsensical half assed attempt at re treading old stories going on in Security Breach captured my interest. Even when the series went in a more high tech direction internal logic was kept. No super intelligent ai just possessed robots being the main thing that Security Breach completely ignored. I can't even bring up the energy to care about the lore any more due to how badly Security Breach broke it. Even theories aren't fun anymore because (almost) every theory seems to be attempting to explain what tf happens in Security Breach. Learning that Scott didn’t communicate any of his ideas to Steel Wool was not surprising in the slightest. Don't get me wrong the fnaf story was confusing long before this however even when it was confusing it was fun! Fnaf had a skelton that was up to the fans to build upon which is probably why fnaf ended up with such a vibrant creative fan base. There is nothing fun about speculating on a game without even a foundation of a story to go off of. Ruins story was better but ANYTHING was better than what happened in Security Breach. Plus, if the main focus of a dlcs story is to retcon parts of the main game then you're probably doing something wrong.
Security Breach was the Sonic 06 of its year. The current sonic team suffers from a lot of the same managerial issues of Steel Wool Studios and you can see how it ends up in Sonic Frontiers when they try new concepts. Security Breach was a failure in so many ways that it cannot be fixed. It needs a full on redesign from scratch to end product.
1:42:15 I appreciate Siege being brought up, because that was the exact game I had in mind. To add to this, Siege's camera systems also include a ghostly view of your own character, it can be seen at any distance no matter where you are in the map, even for someone picking the game for the first time, it is fairly intuitive and easy to find oneself thanks to it.
Ah, crap, I would've brought that up if I played it again and noticed! I like Siege but didn't have time to play it again to record footage. Thanks for bringing that up!
I think my overall thoughts on this game can be best summarized by a certain review about another broken game from 2006: “I didn’t want to hate this game. I have no ill will towards the people responsible for making it. The people over there have made some great content, and I can’t imagine the pressure one would feel trying to make a game as big and as ambitious as it tried to be. Still, I had to play this game. It was SOUL CRUSHING.” Maybe I’m being too charitable in my outlook, but I can’t bring myself to even really be angry with Steel Wool. Maybe that’s because of my two years in game design that taught me a lot about the dangers of death by ambition without the experience or skill to back it up which makes it a bit more empathetic for whatever reason, or the fact that I’ve had a project of my own back during those classes which resulted in scope creep, albeit not to this extreme. (Of course, this doesn’t excuse the outright neglect of common, basic game design principles.) Regardless, I’m just left disappointed and wondering what could’ve been under a smaller, more focused vision where scope creep didn’t bloat the game into a broken, unstable disaster.
Dang, it's been YEARS since I've watched those videos, and I could still hear that quote loud and clear in my head when I read that. Probably what got me into watching these kinds of deep analyses on how and why certain games were designed poorly
If Secret of the Mimic is another horrific mess, i genuinely hope all these bigger RUclipsrs like Fuhnaff and Dawko stop needlessly praising them so they can stay in good graces. It doesn't matter if you act nice to keep your industry ties if it makes everyone see you as a shill.
I honestly think Scott and Steel Wool are lying about how they feel about Security Breach. All the stuttering they make and the made up words feels like they’re frantically trying to come up with a good lie and not admit that the game is a disaster to the public, because as broken as Security Breach is, it was a financial hit.
@@ItsMemeTimeBoi I kinda felt that at first, but there's just too much evidence for a lack of awareness or experience or ability to discern pretty much anything. The fact that Scott even said how lucky he was and how they didn't botch anything is incredible, and Jason's quote on not wanting to change anything feels like saving face, but it also feels so genuine. His answer gives me the feeling that he's not even capable of discerning the truth. It really boggles my mind.
@ I really hope that Secret Of The Mimic has a coherent narrative and good gameplay, I really don’t want to see this franchise crumble, I loved this franchise since 2014 and I don’t want too see it end like this. I doubt the gameplay will be bad, given the fact it’s a VR game which is Steel Wool’s strong suite, but I really REALLY hope the story is good, I doubt it tho 😭😭😭
Also, I kinda wish FNAF stays as like 2D games, point and click teams, and VR games, like smaller scale games. I don’t want FNAF to have big open worlds ever again unless it’s The Joy Of Creation, because when you look at Scott’s catalogue of games and his story, as well as Steel Wool’s catalogue of games, it’s enough to realize that a non Vr free roam game made by Scott and Steel Wool will not work in the slightest. It’s like the equivalent of a middle schooler trying to do calculus.
I can believe that Scott wouldn’t recognize the flaws. His own games mostly only succeed in atmosphere or aesthetics, if even that. He doesn’t strike me as the type to play many games to develop standards with, either.
i honestly havent really seen other people *talking* about how severe the scope creep of Security Breach was, so thank you for this. I remember picking up on it through how the developers talked in their interviews before launch, they were so blissfully unaware of how bad what they were sayin sounded. And I was just hopeful that they weren't being as disorganized as their words came off... But then the game came out and the rest was history. sigh. Honestly I like the set design I like some of the character design, the therapist CDs were the main part of any lore in this that actually caught my interest... but it really didn't work as a game. There were too many important pieces missing with pretty flourishes shoved in to make it seem like there was no issue.
It's so insane how the most telling aspect of Steel Wool and Scott's attitude and refusal to take accountability can simply be seen from their in person/virtual interviews. They're ALWAYS with fans; with young people who aren't journalists or serious game developers and thus can't ask the important questions without fear or skill. This is best seen with Funaff because really, why would they pick him over other famous FNAF youtubers like MatPat or Jackscepticye? It's a clear case of insecurity that they're hiding by only interacting with those with less power than them. These guys can't face the heat and you show this pretty well in how you put interviews from other game developers and the maturity and distance they have towards the fanbase and interviewer. You can truly see the fear Steel Wool and Scott has because they know that they would've been ripped to shreds if they were interviewed by anyone who knows what they're talking about and is powerful enough to not be scared to criticize them
honestly, I feel like even Dawko softballs his interview questions-Scott and Steel Wool don’t just seem to take advantage of the fact that they’re being interviewed by less experienced fans like Funaff, but fans like Dawko also go easy on them *constantly*. I’ve never seen Dawko actually press Scott for answers, and both he and Fuhnaff ask so many of the same generic questions. like, do you really think you’re the first person to ask Scott “what was working on the movie like?” edit: remembered that Dawko has a much more vested interest in staying on Scott’s good side due to the fact he actively releases FNAF merch now, so I suppose it’s a lot to expect that he’d be neutral… but still.
I think Steel Wool needs to be told that while there are artists in game development, they're very different to artists in say the movie industry. Or even the illustration industry. Its not a one size fits all. Case and point. Because artists do play a role in good gameplay and level design. But you need to think very differently to making a background for a movie. And that mindset shift just isnt there. It shows. And it does such a disservice to the artist that help make games what they are
33:53 Fun Fact: Spotlight Monty was supposed to get down and chase the player. But due to a bug, he was removed before release. His old AI can still be activated if you unload the Atrium, even by walking away ruclips.net/video/omcuNAdjkpg/видео.html
Someday I hope Scott and Steel Wool go back and make what Security Breach was supposed to be. No giant mall too big for its own good, less time on the detailing and more on the coding, and the proper story.
I'm hoping there's a minimalist security breach fan remake or something like that, not just because this game was a disappointment but because it'd be nice to actually be able to play the game as a low end PC user, still can't believe this game takes up like 80 GB... I really wish someone would just flatten this game, I know a lot of people have thought of ways to improve the game and that's cool and all but I just want it to be *small.* Like the Scratch remakes of the early games.
@@theflyingspagetidk if it ever could cause even if we look at the original plans for the game 2-3 floors is still pretty big, especially with the detailing of the Pizzaplex, and making it smaller than that really just makes the Pizzaplex any other small Freddy location.
1:43:46 In regards to that, FNAF 2 actually does have a second mechanic to use the cameras - in that flashing animatronics stuns them for a short period of time. However, the problem with that mechanic is Scott barely even mentions it existing ingame. The only time this idea is referenced is during Night 2's call. "Those older models would always get disoriented with bright lights. It would cause a system restart, or something. Uh, come to think of it, you might want to try that on any room where something undesirable might be. It might hold them in place for a few seconds. Uh, that glitch might have carried over to the newer models too." Even if the player becomes aware of this mechanic, the Music Box becomes so polarizing in later nights, that (outside of special strategies like Minus 7), the player won't actually utilize or otherwise forget the mechanic exists.
@@DesignFrameCaseStudiesFoxy's mechanic is that you have to flash him in the hallway since the mask doesn't work on him, and flashing the lights sends him back. For the other withered animatronics, I believe it just stalls their movement, and they can be stalled in the cameras
Not gonna lie, I always thought they should've taken more inspiration from Alien: Isolation than just the save stations and other miscellaneous stuff, like a more unpredictable AI, for example. Obviously, you don't have to reach the complexity of the Xenomorph to be engaging and threatening, but at least to where you're genuinely on edge throughout the game, Monty is like the only enemy in the game where I'm like, "Oh shit," because not only can he not be impeded by anything you throw at him, he also runs faster than you as well, which incentivizes stealth to get by. Right now, the game feels like Alien: Isolation Lite, especially since there's little to no tension aside from the genuinely scary chase music and the thumping footsteps of the animatronics behind you. With RUIN, I admittedly didn't bother completing it, because 1) slower movement speed and 2) the even more scripted-ness and linearity of it all meant fewer opportunities to get random enemy encounters and use strategy to win. Currently, I'm trying to make a mod for base SB that allows the AI to have actual unpredictable roaming instead of being tethered to simple and small patrol points, only deviating from them if they either see you or are checking a hiding spot. Perhaps I'll include it with that Harder AI mod I made one time ago.
dude this is a DISASTER, how did steel wool even make the moderately competent help wanted games?? every part of security breach is completely wasted by these silly storytellers who couldn't tell a story in a game marketed for children.
This is what happens when you have no central focus. This is what managers are for, getting everyone on the same page and reining everyone in *before* scope creep tears them all apart. I know we as a society fucking hate meetings but this game would have been a thousand times better if they all just sat down and had a meeting and got all their ducks in a row. I don't like Security Breach, I never have and have always considered everything past UCN to be completely non-canon. But that doesn't mean Steel Wool are completely evil or incompetent for making it, this is just another Icarus situation. I don't know if you've ever met this kind of dreamer, but there's a lot of them out there, they have big ideas and big hopes and they believe if they work hard enough they can make something great, and then you toss ten of those dreamers in room together and try and get them to work and it just tears apart the project because they're all too passionate about making their vision. This almost always ends up with a project being abandoned or everyone getting so burnt out that they just half ass whatever's left and give up. I don't know if I can make you agree, but to me Security Breach is a tragedy.
@@zlbproductions7340 Yeah i feel like it’s on both Scott for not communicating with Steel Wool telling them the story, and Steel Wool making the pizzaplex unnecessarily big with no purpose, while trying to make sense of things Scott told them to add with no context without stopping to ask what and why, it seems like Scott kinda hasn’t learned either from the release of Into the Pit, in Dawko’s interview he mentioned leaving Mega Cats to develop the game for 6 months before he checked in or they went to him with a game bigger than initially intended
Help wanted is an anthology of games that already existed that they didn’t make with any original content being minigames at best. Help Wanted 2 is entirely minigames. It feels like playing Mario Party in the mode that’s just the minigames, or WarioWare. VR has always been more of a gimmick than anything so it’s not surprising they don’t know how to make an actual full game.
30:48 I so wish Pizzaplex was more like this. Realistically functional as an in-universe attraction The design of the place was so bullshit that people theorized that the events of the story HAD to be distorted by Gregory's childhood perception. Edit: WAIT *FOUR* MOUTHS BEFORE RELEASE!???? WTF????
Thank you so much for bringing up motion tracker from alien isolation. Besides what you said, it even subtly hints the direction where you're supposed to go with line at the border, so that you don't have to look at the map a single time to figure out where you need to go. Even though it is a pretty closed-environment game most of the time, devs still cared. Needless to say, other parts of this 20-hour game are as polished as this one. Still one of the best horror games of all time.
2:12:00 There's also just, absolutely no point in Alien:Isolation where the game expects you to go on hours without a save. 20-30 minutes sure, which I think is perfectly reasonable.
20-30 is excessive, but I don't think Alien has you going that long without a save thankfully haha. Even if the manual saves serve a purpose, it's still difficult to really nail the right pacing and feeling behind it.
The fact that theyre a team of "story telling artists", but then they did burntrap. They looked at fnaf 6, saw the henry monologue ending, and just said "okay, whatever, LETS BRING EM BACK AGAIN!!" Then retconned burntrap to *not* be Afton cuz everyone and their mother was upset. Thats honestly the thing that pisses me off the most. The fnaf 6 ending and Henry's speech is one of the most geniunely amazing finales to a series ive ever seen, and i can still get CHILLS just from watching it again, even after all these years. And just... seeing them sort of spit in fnaf 6's face like this is the saddest thing ever. Ive been a fan of fnaf for years of my life, it was my childhood, and from fnaf 6 onward, since steel wool got involved, Ive basically lost all interest because of how stupid and bad games have gotten since... The ai approach is fucking stupid, and the mimic is NOT scary. I do not fucking care for the guy like i cared for Afton.
I saw this 2+ hour video thinking holy crap this SB Ruin video is gonna be wild, little did I realize that Ruin video is actually an upcoming video and this is just doubling down on how bad the original base game was and still is. A few times the Ruin case study was mentioning in this video and I thought "ah, must be the second half of the video" but nope, hahaha. Anyway, love to see this much more in-depth look at how bad things really were and why - finally someone calling out Steel Wool on how bad their practices are, how crazy Scott is to keep working with them, and how much hubris they exude. Can't wait to rewatch this once a month like the original just to remind myself how incompetent Steel Wool are. p.s., It's crazy how most people slurp up the slop that is their VR games and think everything is good. I played the second one and it's got so many crazy bad UX design choices in it, like did no one play test this???
I honestly wouldn't know about the VR in particular since it's outside of my area. Maybe once I own a VR set. And I'll be checking out SotM flat mode. I hope you like the next videos as well! Thank you for watching! I appreciate you :)
One major thing about steel wool that grinds my gears, im writing this before I watch the video so sorry if this is mentioned, is how it seems like literally ALL the devs in steel wool have the opposite tastes in the games as fans. Like in the interview with Fuhnaff they mentioned how they loved sister location, pizza sim, and the cartoony style and cheesy jokes and vibe it has, honestly that was very telling, and not to mention they said help wanted 1 was too scary? Like idk if I'm just a big boy or something but help wanted 1 was NOT scary at all, it was tense and stressful for like nights 1 and 2 when I first played then it was just eh whatever. I really hate it and I don't wanna be mean, but they just aren't fit for a good future for fnaf, i don't think fnaf will ever be scary again, into the pit was a good step forward to bringing the horror back (not really but kind of) but that game took like what 4 or 5 years of development and it wasn't even steel wool just mega cat i think they're called? It's a shame, scott chose great vr devs but handing the games off to them as much as he did was a bad move.
I've thought the same thing. Steel Wool just seems like a terrible choice for the series, tonally. Sister Location and Fnaf 6 did have that balance, but SW have gone overboard with the goofiness. Keep in mind, the only vaguely tense parts of Help Wanted 1 are the parts where they just remade the classic games (and even that, they arguably screwed up, with things like the new Springtrap model.)
The goofiness is going to kill the series as it loses all of its charm from its spooky atmosphere and becomes just another mascot horror franchise. I didn’t even like Help Wanted 1 from how they butchered the 3 main games; Freddy lost all spook factor in 1 and you could control Foxy making him no longer a threat. They massacred the 2nd game by removing a massive chunk of the threats for most of the nights and completely breaking the gameplay, turning it into a joke. You could practically keep your mask on the whole night. And 3 is 3, but somehow worse. They couldn’t even program the fucking doors for those offices in SB correctly; so when you run out of power, the doors are set to the opposite state instead of open. How do you even do that?!
Honestly for some reason I feel like Ruin and base SB shouldn't have been 2 separate parts, but one whole game in its entirety. Imagine the game starting with this glamorous and shiny pizzaplex that falls to literal ruin as the story progresses, turning from an exploration-like gameplay loop into a more linear experience as the pizzaplex gets destroyed by the end of it?
I know something that perfectly applies to Security Breach. "I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're, that you're using here. It didn't require any discipline to attain it. You know, you read what others had done, and you, and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses, uh, to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew it, you had, you've patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunch box, and now you're selling it, you wanna sell it. You were so preoccupied with whether or not you could, you did stop to think if you should." - Ian Malcom, Jurassic Park
I thought Comedy Bot was way funnier when it was broken. Having the big announcement for the comedy stylings of Comedy Bot, followed by silence, was actually hilarious.
Your channel is a gem. You’re dissecting games in a manner I don’t really see much on RUclips. This is something that really interests me. I like that you go into the game design and also dive into the possible mindset and attitude that goes on deeper in the developer’s minds behind these decisions. Game developer or not, I’m sure we can take something away from these tales as lessons for our personal lives
@@DesignFrameCaseStudieslooking forward to it! You also happen to cover a lot of more niche games I care about. I’ve watched your Luigi’s Mansion video already. And I think your thoughts on the common ghost battles in 3 lacking depth is pretty interesting! I’ve always felt that the fighting in 3 felt the least satisfying in the whole series but couldn’t put it into words why. Looking forward to your cuphead DLC analysis video too (genuinely super excited). I think I’ll watch it once I’m done playing through base game cuphead and dlc. I’m playing it with a friend. So far I barely have any idea of what the DLC is like so I think experiencing it first hand and then hearing your thoughts will be super fun! Really glad I ended up somehow coming across this channel Much love
Since they mentioned Alien Isolation, there's an interesting comparison you should touch on at some point. Cause Alien Isolation was made by Creative Assembly, a game studio known more for the Total War series, which are strategy games. Alien Isolation was them switching it up from their usual mold, not unlike Steel Wool and SB. Yet unlike SW, CA was able to make a better game. Could be something to explore.
I still stand by my theory after all these years that the original concept for Security Breach was a completely open world where the player had 6 real time hours to defeat the Glamrock animatronics or survive until morning, Dead Rising style. This makes sense too when you consider all the "Walk to somewhere far away" objectives and that the average first playthrough for this game is charted at 5-8 hours, suggesting that the game's content was carefully crafted to be completeable in approximately 6 hours. There's a lot of cut content to support this but overall I think the biggest thing that supports my theory is just the massive scale of the Pizzaplex to begin with. It is unnecessarily huge unless the whole point of it is that it's so large that it takes a long time to traverse, putting pressure on the player's resource of time. Combine that with a lot of the cut mechanics and even a lot of the mechanics that actually shipped in the game (like security bot patrols and the security office challenges) and you can start to get this picture that Security Breach was dreamed up as a non-linear Metroidvania of a horror game that fell apart because of many of the factors you've outlined in your video. Security Breach always felt like a game that choked to death on it's own ambition and it's nice to see this video dive into some of that.
Huge maps tend to be a mistake that new developers make. It's a bit surprising that a team with games under their belt did it. Though I guess AAA empty open world games have been in vogue recently so it's probably not fair to call it a new developer problem any more.
What bothers me about the Pizzaplex size is also the fact that it must be SO EXPENSIVE to build and maintain a place like that, Disneyworld levels of expensive. Yet it exists in the FNAF universe, somehow. Somehow, a pizzeria brand gathered enough money throughout the years to build a place like that, and its just too ambitious and expensive to be believable in a lore kind of way. All the space it takes, all the construction funds, all the food expenses, staff bots, energy consumption the whole place must require, I just don't buy it. An Amusement Park would be more believable than what the Pizzaplex is. I'm convinced they just wanted to make something grand and impressive to the eyes while paying very little attention to logic or if it made sense to the FNAF lore.
I can even give Scott and Steel Wool a pass to the "extremely advanced AI" Animatronics because it's been already established in the FNAF universe that technology is way more advanced than in the real world, but I drew the line with the Pizzaplex. It's just too unbelievable. They should have scaled it down imo But as you've shown in the video they were thinking too big and didn't give enough care to what was supposed to make sense, logistics and all of that.
the pizzaplex really reminds me of those super elaborate entertainment venues from the 90's, like Disney quest and the Sega arcades. Those went out business due to many of the issues you brought up (and also because of fast technological progress quickly outdating the attractions offered by them. But thats besides the point.). Even then, the pizzaplex somehow feels way too big even for that kind of place!
@serbidian7140 They made their money and people hype them up regardless. There's no reason for them to fix anything, unfortunately. That's one reason this video exists!
Another incredible video dissecting SB - Sharing this around everywhere I can, and I am so unbelievably excited for the RUIN analysis. Hopefully, SW can actually see this video and understand what you're trying to tell them here. They really need to get more people on their management team who really understand gaming, to help balance out their artistic side with design knowledge and technical ability. I really hope they've learnt their lessons there and have improved for the upcoming Secret of The Mimic, as that game really needs to be a landmark release for the franchise at this point.
Thank you so much, Arty! I greatly appreciate you :) I said this in the video but I hope SW or Scott take this seriously, or at least the fan base. I really feel like this video was necessary. Congrats on your work on Playtime with Percy! That voice acting fit so well. If there are future projects you're working on that could use a second pair of eyes, send them to me ;) I would love to be a part of some cool projects! It's insane that they never sold Percy on Steam though haha
@DesignFrameCaseStudies thank you so much!!! I'm glad you enjoyed my work in PWP haha that was a nice surprise. A steam release is actually coming!! Sometime next year probably. And in terms of new projects... Who knows.... Regardless, great video, super excited for the RUIN essay!
I think part of why Scott stuck with Steel Wool is because he wanted to nurture an indie and also entrust only a single development studio to the IP for all future releases. Basically like mentoring a successor.
At least something like Cuphead and it's dlc, while flawed in many ways, is a finished game with a vision that had the intent of making something fun that I was able to enjoy despite it's shortcomings, Security Breach is just infuriating to play from start to finish. 1:08:15 "They had the passion, they just did not have a brain" is Security Breach in a nutshell I also appreciate that you are not hating on Steel Wool and want them to improve
I’ve always been saddened by Security Breach, and even Help Wanted 2 now. Help Wanted to me was a masterpiece, it set such high expectations for me on what was coming next…. Which was a whole load of nothing…. Well, a whole load of hilarious Markiplier vids, which I can’t complain about.
37:30 On the Phisnom section, is that the Transistor soundtrack I'm hearing? I may be wrong, but it sounds so much like it. I adore Supergiants' music, and the Transistor soundtrack has a dear place in my heart.
@@Max128ping I didn't pay mind to the lyrics but that's sort of fitting, ain't it? lol (But not really, the situation could have been managed). But I use many tracks from Transistor. I can put the specific ones used in the description if requested.
The perfect counter to the godawful atrium is the design of the Nezumi Labs storage rooms in Lost in Vivo. There is one enemy that only moves when you aren't looking in its general direction, and there is a point where a previously open area the size of a cafeteria turns into a maze of boxes. The whole sequence is claustrophobic, disorienting and butt puckering. Steel Wool can learn a lot from Akuma Kira's games overall. Even his larger areas in Lunacid (some of which are meandering paths suspended in instakill voids) are broken up in a way that makes sense.
@@DesignFrameCaseStudies would love to see an analysis of Kira's games, he started out with Spooky's Jumpscare Mansion and consistently puts out bangers
security breach, despite being developed by artists, really suffers from being not immersive. it doesn't how matter how lovingly crafted the game's assets are, having gregory be the locus of interaction for the player completely destroyed my ability to immerse myself in the game world. because gregory is a kid, the camera is placed low the ground, too low, such that everything feels out-of-scale. the basic barriers that the developers haphazardly place around the world are taller than the player, as are the glass guardrails, and the handrails on the escalators. this might not be so bad if everything was this large, but other assets, such as the photo booths, seem unusually small. if you compare the size of the photo booths and the guardrails at 41:38, you can see that the curtain of the photo booth is barely taller than the guardrail. for reference, the height of the average 10 year-old is 4'10, and a good reference for how high off the ground a handrail for a staircase is is roughly 36 inches. even if gregory was only 4 feet tall, he should still be comfortably taller than these basic assets that provide a subconscious sense of scale for the space. these scaling inconsistencies happen repeatedly and work to destroy immersion as you play. it seems evident to me that the asset designers did not have a standard scale for how large things should be, or failed to factor in the differences in feeling from viewing the world of a game through a character, and actually seeing in the real world. there's also smaller details-- the escalators placed all over the world are nonfunctional, and you can sprint up and down stepped parts of the world at full speed. i know it sounds crazy to suggest that traversing the world be made even slower, but when you're trying to build an atmospheric experience, these small immersive details are incredibly important. there also could have been some interesting gameplay strategy involved with playing around staircases and different elevation, but i think it's pointless to talk about in detail, because security breach has fundamental flaws that wouldn't have been alleviated by getting a speed boost from running up an escalator. the pizzaplex also just doesn't FEEL like a scary location. all of the lights are on, and these banal security robots are placed randomly instead of the actually scary main animatronics. i'm willing to concede that this mostly an ethereal complaint-- similar to saying "what if the game was cool and scary actually," reading more as inspiration than actual criticism. critiquing the fundamentals of the art direction is difficult because you can't say objectively how "good" it is. however, it still detracted from my experience and made the game less scary. 1:18:28 this is the kind of belief you develop when you're trying to internally justify to yourself why you don't need to go back and fix something. i hate psychoanalyzing people, but i really think that this guy is really lost in the cope. his product sucked, and he doesn't want to have to internalize that fact. even if security breach was just spotty or ragged at the edges, it should still bother someone, a professional who cares, that the game has even minor issues. the recently published half-life 2 documentary has the developers talking about things they wish they had done differently, things that they admit are janky, because they're professional artists who are able to acknowledge when they make mistakes, and communicate them publicly in order to contribute positively to the development of their medium. half-life 2 is an incredible game, widely well-received, and despite that, its creators are still able to objectively evaluate the degree to which they succeeded in communicating the ideas that they wanted to communicate.
Honestly, I do hope SB can be seen as a cautionary tale for the future, the same vein as Sonic 06 and Fallout 76. I honestly don't have a problem with them loving the game, but the fact that they don't seem as aware of the issues as the rest of us...well, it's something that should be looked into. Nice video! Definitely looking forward to future videos involving SB, as I have mentioned before that I do love the game, but I do wanna learn even more about it's history!
That's exactly why I think this video was so important to release. It's the crazy lack of awareness and attitude (and inability to implement decent design changes or seemingly display integrity or care, etc.) that concerns me more than anything, from both them and Scott, and people need to be aware of the state of the franchise. There's certainly nothing wrong with liking the game, it's entertaining and fascinating for sure, but it should be for the right reasons and with a respectful awareness.
At some point, game designers and players both have managed to convince themselves that an Open World's value is primarily its size. Just the sheer vastness of the space you're allowed to wander and the scenery you can see. Players have realized there's more to it than that, but I feel like devs have forgotten there's more to it than just size and things to look at. I feel like devs are prone to use an open world improperly now more than ever. Security Breach is just one example of a sadly growing list.
So wait, let me get this straight…the players said "The cameras have no real use in the game, so we never use them while playing", and Steel Wool's takeaway was "Players aren't using the cameras?! Let's throw in an extra tutorial on how to use them so they don't have an excuse not to use them!"? I…am speechless. The more I learn about this game and its development, the more appalled I am. Speaking as a creative storyteller myself, I understand getting caught up in a vision, and I respect a team that wants to maintain artistic integrity, I do, truly I do…but there's staying true to your art, and there's refusing to learn your art better. I know the instinctive feeling of wanting to protect and defend your babies, but your babies won't grow if you coddle them. You need to internalize a certain amount of negative feedback in order to improve as an artist; if you insist that you're perfect and anyone who disagrees is just wrong, that's not artistic integrity, that's narcissism. In the current era, where a lot of creatives are being exploited and suppressed in big media companies, I feel like there's an increased defensiveness amongst them - a mentality of "It may be just a little criticism now, but where do we draw the line? If we let people control our artistic vision even a little, we're opening the floodgates for them to just mold our work into something that doesn't even resemble what we were trying to make!" But just as there's a difference between criticism and hate, there's a difference between quality control and corporate tyranny. Stay true to your vision, yes, but let other people guide you towards expressing your vision in a way your audience will appreciate. Seriously, if any fellow creative types read this: your art is precious, but common folk won't understand it the way you do, and you need to meet them halfway in how you present it. All of this reminds me of how the original collapse of the video game industry decades ago, though often blamed on one particular game, was actually due to several factors, and one of those was a lack of quality control - people were just making whatever games they wanted and publishing them, and that wore the public's patience thin to the point that the one game in question managed to shatter it. What's more, the resurrection of the video game industry was partly due to the introduction of quality control, in which Nintendo had a standard games had to adhere to before they could be published on their new "entertainment systems" - games that simply didn't work weren't allowed to be published, which won the public's trust, allowing the industry to boom. These are lessons we've already learned IN THIS SPECIFIC MEDIUM'S HISTORY. Which…at the end of the day, sadly, is comforting, actually - we've been here before, and we figured it out, so there's reason to believe we'll get there again. It sucks that we have to do this all over again and relearn everything, but that kind of feels like the standard for everything in the world right now, so…I'm resigned to it. V_V I also want to apologize for being so wordy; this is just how I am. If anyone bothered reading this, I appreciate you and wish you all the best. :)
Okay, I'm at the beginning, and I will watch the video in full and post another comment with my takeaway. However, a large open space getting constricted to tell a specific story does not preclude using that space again in a different way. I am a writer. When revisiting a location, it SHOULDN'T be the same. If its the same, WHY are we HERE? The point of introducing a setting where anything seems possible is to then restrict it and tell the story of people reacting to that restriction. Keys To The Kingdom is a great literature example, the books take place in maybe 4 key locations, but all of those locations changes drastically as the story progresses. The hospital becomes a death trap when the military shows up to enforce quarentine. The protag's house becomes unfamiliar and depersonalized as he develops into a new being. The school starts out as an obligation but comes to feel like a hostage situation. And then there's The House. A metaphysical location that is the heart of the universe, shuffling and changing and morphing while keeping records of all of existance. And its dying. Without change and restriction, the story wouldn't have been half as interesting.
I’m gonna be honest. I love the open world aspect of SB. The pizzaplex feels so alive, like it has sooooo much little details that makes it feel like an actual functioning building.
And that's great! But it's not a game, and so little of it is interactive, so it's not very interesting and becomes bland quite quickly to me and to those who were playing it as a game, you know? And some details are strangely lacking, like words on the plaques of museum items in Rockstar Row.
@ yeah there definitely are areas like those that hinder the game. I get it! I just mean there is a lot of environmental story telling that tells little stories.
Learning that the main 3 creative/executive leads are animation people (and mainly lighting/vfx) instantly made the break down that happened click for me. As much as the heads of sw worked at pixar or are good enough animators to get hired right out of school, at the end of the day they arent story people and as such they arent going to be using gameplay to push story either. The fetch quest after fetch quest gameplay totally makes sense to me now because thats the easiest to write when you arent a story person/have very little experience writing story for game. Like, not to knock down any of the extremely skilled lighting and vfx people but theres a reason that storyboard artists and writers are typically promoted to director/creative lead/head of story roles on animation projects and not vfx people. The mode of thinking is completely different from one another which is why you get this gorgeous environment (when it loads properly lol) with very little substance. The leads at sw focus is on the glitz and the glamour and not necessarily the gameplay (and by extension story) of the project because its literally NOT IN THEIR TRAINING. The fact that they DIDNT bring in anyone with actual game dev experience is baffling but it lines up what you said about how the people at sw are unable to acknowledge their own shortcomings. It was honestly going to be a disaster the moment "open world exploration" was put into any of their heads cuz to me it sounds as if the team only ever yes and'd everyones ideas
That'd require a rework, including reworking the Pizzaplex itself. I don't think they're capable of that anyway, from the evidence I've seen thus far...
This video opened my eyes to a lot of problems that I wasn't aware of the breadth of, and I think you gave many salient points. As someone who tends to enjoy things more than the layman would, often despite any noticeable flaws, and who often avoids negative criticism of media I enjoy for personal reasons, I give you huge props for creating a video fascinating and well-composed enough for me to watch for any considerable amount of time. However, I feel as though if your goal was to reach the attentions, minds, and/or hearts of the developers as you stated at the beginning of your video, then I'm worried you may not be successful. Granted, I am also probably more sensitive than the average internet user, but I found the general tone of this video to be very mocking, particularly in its editing style. Your decision to repeat peoples' lines right after they said them throughout the video, for example, and the way in which you did so, seemed from my subjective viewpoint to be at the expense of those people instead of for them. Choices like that just sort of gradually wore down on me. It's at the point where as just a fan of parts of Steel Wool's games sitting at around the halfway mark of your runtime, I'm uncomfortable enough with the vibes of this video that I don't think I'm going to finish watching it. I can imagine that an individual from Steel Wool might react even more aversely. Again, this is my subjective opinion. I'm sorry for any rudeness or impropriety in my comments, and I'm also sorry for closing myself off to the latter half of the video and depriving you of an opportunity to change my mind. There is definitely something to be said for me developing a thicker skin, especially as someone interested in the creative process. Regardless, I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors, and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week!
There may be mocking but it's for entertainment purposes, and if it's at their expense, it's by their own making, since I make sure to provide overwhelming evidence for each point. For those who care for the franchise, enough is enough. I'm not going to attack them, but I'm not going to coddle them either. With that said, I respect your decision! There's a ton in this video and a range of topics in the latter half, such as their design changes from their patches, if you decide to return.
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*_FAQ_*
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*0. **_Prerequisite Mindset & Personal Experience_* ► There's nothing wrong with finding the game fun in your personal experience, but your enjoyment of something doesn't mean it is without flaw nor does it change objective design flaws. We can all agree that we want to see Steel Wool and the industry improve as they continue to make games. I provide the evidence and means to do so in the behind-the-scenes game design space (and much more in the next FNaF videos), and I hope you find value in that rather than a shallow reinforcement of your feelings. This does not mean that your personal experience is invalid. You are free to enjoy what you want. In fact, I very much love and appreciate hearing your personal experiences in the comments. In the case of Security Breach, it's clear cut where the enjoyment derives from, so don't allow branding to cause you to deceive yourself. If you truly care about FNaF, this video should be meaningful to you.
I hold myself to a high standard and provide evidence and game design information in what I hope is in a digestible format. I am not always correct; I am human, and I am always learning. I welcome constructive feedback. I'm also happy to assist in clarifying concerns or questions, if I have the time. However, I don't accept dismissive or unsubstantiated comments. Also, interpreting others unfavorably is not constructive. Please treat everyone here with respect. Thank you for being awesome and I hope to see you around!
One thing that always frustrated me was the misuse of Gregory himself. Like Gregory is like what? 10? Imagine, instead of blocking off things with invisible walls and arbitrary security barriers, Gregory is to scared to go alone because freddy is hurt in this area. Like, instead of the barriers, the lights are out in that place and Gregory is to scared to go because he thinks Moon is in there and its dark (and kids are scared of the dark) so that way the player can't go into that area yet. It would be so easy to make the characters scary, Gregory is a child! Make the characters scary because the character you play has is scared! Instead of hiding from the animatronics because they teleport, have the screen darken and the characters breathe quicken as the animatronic approaches and you're stuck in place until you have to force Gregory to run. It would make the game scarier and encourage you to avoid the animatronics. You don't want to get stuck in place and you don't want the kid you're getting attached to throughout the game to get hurt so you avoid the animatronics. Steelwool refuses to use Gregory as any more than a vessel for the player when he could be so much MORE. you don't need a big pizzaplex when, in the mind of a child, EVERYTHING is ginormous. Especially when you're on your own. It would be so easy to make the game smaller and scarier but they refuse because they're just to cocky. Like, they're so caught up in the lore and the set design that they don't know how to utilize the very basic tools of storytelling. Latch on to the character and it makes everything much scarier.
I despise any author who, when interviewed about their work, gasses themselves up over how "ambitious" or "expansive" (or whatever other vague buzzword adjective) their project was. It's genuinely shocking seeing these interviews with Steel Wool, where the devs don't look even slightly concerned about the shoddy state of the game, and instead gush about how big the pizzaplex is. Insane.
I wish more devs were humble and self-critical, even in the face of financial success.
I agree. That's one reason I felt this video was so important to release. Thanks for watching! I appreciate you :)
I feel part of that is “PR speak” or “words for the shareholders”.
Now, most of the time, lead devs (or lead workers in most industries really) are forced to say stuff that keeps the shareholders happy and keep/cause more potential consumers/investors to be interested, even if it’ll blow up in their face.
The difference here is that Steel Wool (from my understanding) doesn’t have share holders (with only Scott being their investor for FNAF related stuff if I’m not mistake). They can *afford* to be honest about it’s poor progress and troubled development (maybe ask for a delay to redo the whole project), and look back on the project with regret. They’re *able* to be more transparent and open about things since they don’t have to worry about share holders withdrawing their funding.
This kind of hints that Steel Wool might have/had internal issues, like something akin to toxic positivity. Considering there’s no way any dev wouldn’t feel at least a tinge of regret with the way SB turned out, especially with how “ambitious” they wanted it to be.
@@Dr.Oofers Great point!
toxic positivity is what fueled the disaster piece known as concord.
I think what did it in for me with this video was Scott's response trying to defend steel wool too. Like they made a bad product and a mess of his IP, if he isn't going to try to defend the IP he's worked so hard to build up then what does that tell us the fans? That Scott no longer cares enough about FNAF universe to ensure its quality?
Finally, someone includes Scott in this conversation. I'm tired of people idolizing him to the point where they ignore his contributions to SB development issues. Scott has a tendency to fixate on one thing at the time himself, so it shouldn't be a mystery why SB turned the way it did. He sees an issue and makes the next game focused around fixing it, but doesn't seem to care about the bigger picture.
With SB everyone involved was so fixated on the game being big and impressive on the outside that they didn't bother making it an enjoyable experience. Which reminds me of how Scott treated Fnaf three. All visuals with gameplay leaving people disappointed and jumpscares being lackluster.
Not to mention his history with giving the jobs to people he likes. Despite lack of quality in their work required for such projects. It's frustrating to see people put him on a pedestal. Showing off the clips, of him saying how he cares about quality or how Fnaf World taught him to never take people for granted.
But if he really cared then why he gave away the rights to make plushies that looked worse than the bootleg ones? What about those graphic novels everyone laughed at and that inaccurate lore book? He handed the development of a big project to people who didn't have the experience and/or mindset to handle it. He is and always was a part of the problem.
I'm quite aware we are all humans, we make mistakes. But for him, it's simply a pattern of behavior. He says one thing, and then does something contradictory. Just for others to quote him and blame all of his mess on an inexperienced team of devs. They are responsible, that's undeniable, but can we stop pretending like Scott didn't enable all of this? I wish I could see in him the stuff he says about himself, but it seems like he's manifesting making good decisions. And failing. I might be too harsh on him, but others coddled him enough over the years, so it should balance out. People seem to bash Steel Wool with no issue. But the respect for Scott seems to shield him from the criticism.
I'm so invested into all of this mainly because I grew up on these games. I had a similar mindset. But ironically enough after hours of watching retrospectives, essays, revisiting my own memory and looking stuff up, suddenly I cannot take these interviews with him seriously. It sounds nice on paper, but it is not reflected in reality.
I would be surprised if ONE person decided to read all that. If you do exist kind stranger, I wish you a nice day~~
(And if you like Scott more power to you, I'm just tired of pretending like he's not part of the puzzle)
Spot on! I appreciate you :)
@@DesignFrameCaseStudies Aww
Agree, especially after hearing about the weird Burntrap thing! Like, did he never think to tell someone “hey, that’s not really what I meant.” Or don’t tell them to include it if you are going to be vague about what it means
Scott is very much an enabler and the root of the problem lol
I love your comment! Super well written and exactly what I’ve been thinking!
"Who's watching a two hour video essay on a game they've never played at 3 in the morning?"
Me: OH BOY THREE AM
haha feel free to come back to it after a good night's rest :)
wow its the same comment on every single video essay! truly incredible
@@smkslpsd Please be nice. Nothing is truly original. But it doesn't mean it isn't genuine.
@@smkslpsd"hahaha, I do that" - Left At London, 2016
Tale as old as time... Meme as old as Vine~
Literally me
Vanny barely being in a game where she was meant to be the "Mr X" of it is a tragedy by itself
True, but I'm not sure how she could've been an engaging mechanic in the Pizzaplex. That's a big challenge to tackle.
@DesignFrameCaseStudies Easy, make her spawn in EVERY area Gregory goes in, upgrade her AI so she's not always aware of where you are, but your overall location. Think the Xenomorph from Alien Isolation.
Give her a knife, she's meant to be a killer, give her more voice lines, give her more abilities other than just walking (there are unused animations of her walking in pretty creepy ways as well as crouching, suggesting she could go inside vents with gregory).
The game would still be crap, but Vanny would be respected.
Security Breach feels like they took a huge, lovingly crafted VRChat hangout world and poorly stapled stealth gameplay and fetch quests onto it.
1 hour in and it’s incredibly refreshing to hear someone say the quiet part out loud instead of this blind and nonsensical optimism.
Exactly
Valve recently released a documentary and dev commentary for Half-Life 2, one of the most influential games of its time that set the bar for how games should be -at minimum-. Even then, they had some misgivings about their design decisions, even poking fun at themselves. Robin Walker referred to one questionable moment as "magical bullshit." Most players wouldn't even have noticed, but by his admission, the devs still weren't proud of it. Further ahead, you find a mortar that had been giving you hell a few maps back. Too bad you can't fire it yourself... which a dev admitted was a missed opportunity. They even address a failed attempt at preventing you from trying to go down a slide in a playground; they couldn't get the physics for it right, so they broke the ladder. But you can just climb up the slide itself, and a dev conceded that, as is often the case, we the players got the last laugh on them.
Steel Wool have done no such introspection. If they have, they refuse to publicly admit it.
It really worries me for their future projects. I hope they can step outside their echo chamber long enough to realize that the aggrieved among us (most of us, anyway) are more frustrated than anything else. The game screams "fizzled potential." They flew too close to the sun. FazFriends has a bunch of videos showcasing the amazing attention to detail they had, which only dials up the frustration. I love everything about Security Breach, EXCEPT the gameplay and story. I haven't played it myself, but I've seen enough to understand what I'd be getting myself into. I just hope they can partner up with some devs who know what they're doing, that way the artists can do what they do best while still crafting a worthwhile gameplay experience. I don't know what to expect, but we'll have to see. It's up to them to turn things around.
Hell, even the thing described as "magical bullshit" only happens under the specific circumstance, where you manage to kill the two miniboss enemies in the area before one of them gets a chance to shoot at a gas tanker (which only happens when the total health of the two enemies is low); causing it to explode.
If you do that, and it is difficult (but I have managed to do it myself), the gas tanker just explodes on its own.
I'm not sure if the Valve devs missed something or not before recording that developer commentary line given its kind of misleading phrasing, but if they didn't, that's one hell of a commitment to standards.
@@Gulliblepikmin At least it's more justifiable "magical bullshit" than teleporting animatronics, right? The exploding gas tanker falls within the realm of plausible deniability at worst. Gigamonty? Not so much.
@@XiaoXiaoMan1123 Yeah. I wouldn't try to deny that it's on the low end of unbelievability.
The comedy bot being confirmed will always be hilarious to me.
I just assumed its broken routine was intentional, so hearing that it actually does have jokes is ironically less funny to me.
I was playing this with my child (for my child lol) and even if it was completely bug free (it absolutely isn’t) it is the epitome of a rotten foundation. It was frustrating boring and confusing from the jump. But my boy loved the characters so much I kept slogging for him. I was genuinely dumbfounded when Design Frame showed the quote saying Steel Wool was “content with the game in its current state” I had to take multiple breaks despite my son’s egging on bc I would be killed by animatronics who could not detect me in my hiding spot but never left and then lost over half an hour of progress. TBH I got the escape ending and uninstalled lol. When he asks for a revisit I tell him he can play it himself lol.
Yes! That's the exact experience that's typical in the game if people weren't so blinded by the branding! But some just don't know any better, so I think it's important to expect more than slop from our games, especially a huge franchise. Thanks for sharing :)
You should teach your kid about taste. I am a FNaF fanboy and I despise this game.
maybe once your kid actually plays the game, he will quickly realize something is wrong with it.
If I were you I would just let them play the old fnaf games, 10 year old me loved them lol (at 12 doom2016 should also be fine xD)
i was learning a lot about project management for an IT class and they always talk about scope creep and how it's one of the main causes of project failures and such, but i never understood its significance and how horrible it could be until you showcased it in this case study, very informational and truly what a nightmare scenario for a project
I'm glad you could apply your learning here! That's awesome! Thanks for watching :)
I remember watching Markiplier play Security Breach. For context, his FNAF videos have always consistently made me laugh since 2014. This one though…he looked broken by the end of it. His 2 hour livestream where Chica spawned on top of him and killed him was just the icing on the cake. When I watched him play Ruin, he seemed to enjoy it more than the main game which made me happy.
I don’t have much hope but I hope someone at Steel Wool sees this video and takes all the criticisms to heart. I think what worked for Ruin was that it was a smaller experience than the main game which meant that the atmosphere could be creepy.
Very true! The honest or semi-honest creators convey so much pain during their playthroughs!
For me, favorite SB experience would still be Phisnom. Dude was so excited and ended up ranting in Spanish with only music man section bringing him any thrill and joy
That's how he got cancelled, he believed ruin was bad.
@Brite-um2tq I mean it kinda is, it's definitely way more enjoyable than base SB, but still, Alien Isolation and Dead Space, two games that Ruin reminded me of, do what Ruin tried to do significantly better, and Isolation is a good comparison to base SB, as base SB reminded me a lot of Alien Isolation, both games were their respective studios first attempt at that kind of game, with the Creative Assembly group working on the Total War game series and Steel Wool being a VR studio, but the reason Phil got canceled was not due to his opinion of Ruin, that is factually incorrect, he was canceled due to how he handled what happened afterwards, joking about getting gore sent to him instead of a minor, who couldn't respectfully disagree with Phil's opinion on Ruin, and instead had to be a whiny toddler and say, "When FNAF+ comes out I'm gonna call it shit even if it's not"
@@rodimusmagnus5586 Dude he encouraged his fans to mob the kid with death threats, that and his extreme unprofessionalism and making a general ass of himself whilst hiding from criticism behind his toxic "persona". I used to watch his stuff cuz I agreed with his take on SB but you have to admit man's childish as all hell.
"They worked too hard on the wrong things" is a great single sentence summary of my feelings on the game. I'm very willing to forgive games being weird or jank if I can see the ambition, and Security Breach has ambition in spades. It's just clear that this studio, as passionate as they were and as many genuinely good ideas as they have, wasn't ready to make this kind of project.
I thought some of the writing in the side-story with the human staff being increasingly concerned that they're being replaced by robots was genuinely a fantastic place for the series to go. The fear of being replaced is uniquely applicable to both humans and robots in a way that could create some really neat places for the story to go.
I think that given (a fucking significant amount of) time, Steel Wool is capable of making really good FNAF content. They've just got some introspection to be doing.
I agree! Though a big point in this video is that they're unwilling to introspect, unfortunately 😅 Or incapable of. Not sure which is worse.
The pizzaplex is actually an amazing design and I agree with Steel Wool that its a place I would want to go...
just not in a videogame. I've had more fun bumming around in security breach vrchat worlds than playing the actual game.
@Wootmaster For sure! The only argument that matters for a game is that the Pizzaplex sucks for a game and gameplay and for a project scope. Nothing was done with it in the game! At least VR Chat got some use out of it 🤣
@@DesignFrameCaseStudiespizzaplex haters 🤝 pizzaplex lovers
this building was not meant to be in this game
It's a wonderful design visually and feels like they thought about what people would want in a real attraction - but the size and bloat ruined it as a game environment, between the useless map, camera issues, and overall emptiness of the environments.
@@rowandoyle7I believe that better developers could utilize the space effectively.
Makes for a pretty good GMod map, at least
It truly boggles my mind why Scott wanted a VR studio to make a free roam game, and when they made it too big, why the fuck did he not say, “stop this”
Edit: also note how the best fnaf game since the Steel Wool era begun wasn’t created by Steel Wool, with that game being Into The Pit.
Because Scott constantly mishandles the franchise since retiring
If I had to make a genuine guess outside of "Scott is mishandling the franchise", because that's an obvious thing, I think he probably thought that VR and free roam is similar in terms of game development. As far as I'm aware, Scott mostly uses Clickteam for game development, so he probably doesn't have a whole lot of experience in developing a fully 3D free roam game or VR game. So, he probably assumed that since both VR and free roam 3D both use 3D models, that the creation and development of both types of games must be similar enough that experience in one means experience in the other.
Idk I might just be stupid though.
19:26
This whole segment and beyond reminds me of a quote.
"An architect's dream is an engineer's nightmare"
@@gjeraonyt1356 Beautifully said!
facts
"Shoot for the moon, if you miss you'll land among the stars."
Yeah, tell that to the _Challenger_ crew...
@@theflyingspagetlmao, very dark but very funny
It feels like Steel Wool has just listened to all the blind positivity from fnaf fans that just enjoy anything labeled fnaf, and not a single bit of the people giving harsh (but VERY needed) criticism. Great job on this video, editing and all.
They listened to feedback for Ruin and HW2, though?
I mean no right? Ruin bought security breach from god awful to like a decently mid experience. And help wanted 2 was consistently praised. From what I've heard the newly announced mimic game demo at PAX seemed to not be terrible either. I think it's pretty clear they are listening to feedback, they just don't seem to want to admit fault in public interviews lol.
@@DetectiveYuki You're not wrong but Ruin didn't change anything about Security Breach aside from maybe a few bug fixes. It's effectively it's own, new experience.
As a FNAF fan I gotta say FNAF fans will faen over jingling keys all the time... The movie being the best example with people saying it was perfect or near perfect...
@@KumihoMahao The movie was the embodiment of what I hate in this franchise and I don't trust people who had a good time watching it. Especially since most people who liked it were screaming in union any time reference to a game was on the screen.
"You had too many expectations so no wonder you didn't like it". I had none, I came with clear head. And I still think it's a boring and confusing, on many levels. Having all that knowledge about the games makes it even harder to understand. Because they share names and appearances of people who they are clearly not.
"It feels like any time something fnaf-related comes out it's another universe." - Me (Right now)
I think Scott forgotten that his parodies of future projects (Like Fnaf 57 Freddy in Space) were not supposed to be predictions. At this rate we might get a multiverse movie in a few years.
IMAGINE - This time Afton is the kid. But the actor is the same so it's a middle-aged man in primary school. And during lunch he goes to Freddy Fazzber's cafeteria. Then he jumps into a ball pit that shows him all the lore Scott scrapped just to piss off MatPat... Then music man is an actual man, a dj school hired for a school dance. And all other students are Endos. And at the end we learn that the killings were the friends we made along the way. Also there are Aliens because we already made ghosts science and also the killer is a computer virus and can control animatronics so why shouldn't there be aliens?
If that ever comes true I will sue Scott since he obviously stole this idea from me.
You are my witness KumihoMahao
Seen some people call this meanspirited, I mean i guess some points in the video with the meme clips could be considered that, but everything else, no. At some point you have to call Steelwool out for this shit and drag them a little bit. They got peoples money and put out a bad product, and then had the audacity to say they were content with the changes they made, when in reality they hardly made the game any better bug wise. It's laziness and lack of transparency
I remember DJ Sterf recalling how he was brought on to play test the dlc. I believe he recalled that the reactions to his feed back were always mildly hostile, as if he was attacking the devs directly by pointing out basic bugs and glitches.
That's really interesting and certainly lines up with SW's disposition. Do you recall where he talks about that?
@DesignFrameCaseStudies I might be misremembering what he said, but on his RUIN chapter 2 video at 38:22 he talks about his experience being a QA tester and how he was brought on. He may have just been saying in general of what typically happens as a QA tester however.
@@tancoat1346 I watched the clip in question - his comment was saying that other people he's worked with have been aggressive towards him in terms of QA, but Steel Wool was particularly charitable to him with his involvement.
@@artydoesstuff1534 That's true, but I find it very interesting how everyone who worked with steel wool have only the highest opinions of them despite the state of the game they created. Just as well, in that clip Sterf remarks on how two QA studios on top of him joined in to bug test the DLC with him recalling over 2200 bugs found by him alone. But even then the DLC much less the base game was incredibly buggy. Though I was wrong about what was stated in the clip, I do believe the clip itself holds significance.
@@tancoat1346 I think its because Steel Wool is good at like human interaction and just being personable.
So its hard to hate them even if their products are less than stellar because if you worked with the people you know them on a human level.
Its not like with us. We know theyre people, but we have no emotional or social connection with them. We only know what they present to us with interviews, what products they created and sold.
It is a skill you have to learn to be able to make a social connection and still be able to bluntly critique a work. Personally, Ive only ever really seen it be taught in art subjects. I could be wrong, but I havent seen other subjects in school or other fields focus on teaching that skill to kids or students
It feels like a Greek tragedy, such a terrible mismatch of skillset. They're brilliant artists who have created arguably some of the best (or at least, most popular) character designs for FNAF in the Glamrocks and couldn't follow through on making a game that people want to play. The pizzaplex has a brilliant design visually, but is a broken slog in execution, and the fact that they can't or won't see that feels like some sort of tragic curse.
Icarus except Daedalus was just advising from afar and watched while his son made the most shoddy ass wings and flew straight up...
Remember aspiring artists! Each area needs their own specific skills and mindsets.
Being a background artist for an animated movie is very different to being a level designer!
even if I'm not a game designer yet, this video gave me a bit of perspective on how mismanaged scope can consume a project and how arrogance/ignorance can kill it for good. definitely a principle I want to keep in mind for my future endeavours.
@@Chillipeffer I'm very glad you found this informative! Thank you for watching :)
I gotta be real with myself,I will probably never play any game in the franchise,but I will still devour this 2 hour essay as I have gotten more enjoyment from fnaf lore theories and game analysis than I think I could have ever gained actually playing the games.
I totally agree. FNaF is entertaining to watch other people play haha!
Thank you so much for the support! :)
Play FNAF World! It's super easy and feels like a love letter to the fans who cheer from the sidelines.
You should play the ones Scott made. Most of them are great.
@@Korra228Don't forget into the pit and The joy of creation remake (when it comes out). Their good too.
You know it says a lot when the outsourced intro sequence is the most visually appealing part of the game despite the studio being 'art centric'...
@@boanoah6362 Exactly why I mentioned that! It's really funny 🤣
The game just feels unrealistic in size and that's my biggest gripe with it. Second gripe is that they don't justify the size. You're running through an area filled with stuff but it's still empty and there's nothing to do in it. In skyrim you'll never enter an area without having many many things to do in it, in this game you struggle to find one thing to do in it.
4:44 NOOOOOOO
they fell into the classic creative art trap! Even in scriptwriting you are not supposed to get too attached to any one idea for risk of bloat, pacing issues etc.
Edit: I have a sneaking suspicion they didn’t do a Game Design Doc….
Fantastic investigative piece. I felt I had to comment just to respectfully disagree with a few comments I saw saying the tone of your video was too mean spirited and/or condescending. Respect does not mean speaking softly and comfortingly like teaching a child. These are grown professionals that were handed one of the most profitable IPs of our time, put out a completely unacceptable product and are in full blown denial of it. CD Projekt Red had a full blown campaign launched against them for Cyberpunk 2077. I do not think large parts of that backlash were constructive in the slightest but CDR learned something, patched the hell of the game, then came back with an amazing piece of DLC. That shows what can happens when fans push studios to acknowledge and reflect on their mistakes. I understand that the tone of this video might be too much for some but I just wanted to throw my two cents out and say it was perfect. The Fnaf community seems so creepily insular and cliquey. This blunt honestly is desperately needed in my view.
Thank you so much! I personally think you're spot on. I really appreciate it :)
I don't think anyone is suggesting that he's being disrespectful or condescending, more than some parts of this video are reminiscent of that old RUclips rant review style which can detract from the actual criticism. It's a fine line to walk.
As one of the people who made one of those comments, I don't care about being disrespectful, I've never played a FNaF game and have no connection to the franchise, and I'll gladly admit it's fun to see someone dunk on an awful bit of media.
My concern is that it gives incredibly mixed signals a) tear apart a game and it's devs but also b) have a disclaimer saying all of this is just for the benefit of the devs and c) promote a games consultancy service alongside it
If the point of the video is to be a case study, I would expect to see discussion of both good and bad parts of the game (as far as I can tell the only positive mentioned was SW's passion for the game, nothing about a mechanic or design element they liked). If the video is specifically about scope creep, I would expect it to be far more trimmed down and structured around that. If it's about the bugs, sure, just focus on those. If it's about their games consultancy skills, tell me _how you_ would fix an issue, not just that it exists, I read their website and it explicitly stated on it "we don't think there's such a thing as a bad mechanic", but the video is just criticism of the negatives without any of that positivity or empathy they suggest elsewhere.
My issue isn't _just_ that it's a mean video, my issue is that it's a _pointlessly_ negative video, that seems to want to promote positive aspects in game design, yet doesn't take any steps in that direction.
As stated before, I'm not a FNaF fan, and I've actually really enjoyed previous design frame videos (I've been subscribed since the original SB video and greatly enjoyed the cuphead ones), this isn't me trying to defend anything. I also don't think this video is awful, it makes some genuinely great points about design scope and knowing your limits. I just think the tone of the video is at serious odds with both its stated goal and previous works on the channel.
Thank you for mentioning Cyberpunk 2077's launch against SB's. It was FASCINATING being a fan of both IPs during each launch- the fandoms behaved completely differently, and SB was just as broken and unplayable as Cyberpunk. It was like talking to a brick wall on either side when trying to either preach that CDPR *was getting better* and cyberpunk was playable now, or that Steel Wool was behaving inexcusably in the face of just how broken their game was.
Security Breach was fucking detrimental to FNAF as a whole dude. This was supposed to be *the* breakout fnaf game that people who had no idea what FNaF was would get their first impressions of, and we got... this. The writing was on the wall when Scott made that blog post referring to the game's development as "adding more and more layers to a cake". What a wasted opportunity at every level. Not even RUIN was any better.
An opinion of mine that I think kinda delves more into lore than gameplay (depends on the team really) but i genuinely think there was no saving this game. The inherent premise of it being some gigantic pizzaplex is fundamentally flawed, and imo very unsuitable for FNaF as an IP. I don't understand why they didn't just take inspiration from the RE7+ formula. I think that would have worked fantastic for a big budget, free-roam FNaF game.
This game should've been a brand new reboot rather than a continuation of the very well wrapped up OG canon. Wtf were Scott and Steel Wool thinking when writing this thing?
It was going to be a reboot, but when they scaled back the game Vanny was left on the cutting room floor and they shoved in Afton to fill the cracks.
Nothing about the modern lore messes with the OG lore that badly? Afton's still dead, the MCI and all his victims are all still dead likely, Mike and Henry are still dead- There's literally only just a few overlaps, like with the presence of the FFPS pizzeria, the remains of old animatronics in the Tangle, return of characters like Candy Cadet, old FNAF games having their events represented in the indie games ad FNAF VR in universe, and a few more. Like I don't get the statement anymore? It effectively IS almost a reboot/new story at this point
@@anorak3334 It can't be a reboot AND a continuation - it can only be one or the other. A reboot is something entirely different. Different lore, different characters, different universe. A continuation is just, well, a story continued. They aren't the same. You can't have both. You can't have a half-and-half.
From a storytelling perspective... Yes, Security Breach at worst does the original lore an injustice, and at best is completely meaningless.
When working with an IP that already exists, you can't have your cake and eat it too. Simply put.
It's possible to make a continuation with an all-new setting and cast, but it *has* to be relevant. It *has* to be of substance to the core foundation of the series. It can have a different story, but the themes and narratives *have* to relate to what has already been established.
I mean, look at literally anything SpiderMan related from the past 2 decades - different takes on the same characters and the same story. That is a reboot. Now imagine if instead of going the multiverse route, storytellers tried to convince us that, actually, all of these Spidermen exist in the same world, just at slightly different times! That is what Security Breach tried to do.
It gave us a new setting and new characters and a lore that does not relate to the previous games at all but then chickened out the last minute and tried to tie it into the rest of the canon, so it's own detriment. There was no point in it - they didn't NEED to do it - so why do it?
FNAF at its core is about A serial killer targeting kids where they were meant to be safest; said kids haunting the establishments; enacting revenge on their killer. That's it.
FNAF 1 establishes this. FNAF 2 adds to this through the minigames, mostly. FNAF 3 adds to this through minigames, and through making the murderer a primary threat/antagonist. FNAF 4 adds to this through minigames, and through allowing us to play as a vital main character in the canon lore. Sister Location adds to this by giving us further insight into the murderer and his family. Pizza Simulator adds to this by, quiet literally, giving us an ending to the story and it's characters.
And then Security Breach is just... There. Pointless. In a limbo. It doesn't add ANYTHING. And yet, for some godawful reason, it tries to tie itself in as if it does. It fails to establish its own core narratives because it wants to hitch off of that of the previous games, when even with that context in mind, Security Breach's story honestly makes NO SENSE!
You can't make a half-reboot half-continuation that's only relevant when its convenient, that's the kind of writing I can forgive out of a 12 year old fanfic writer, not a $50 console game with an adult team behind it.
Security Breach COULD have been a good addition to the canon lore had it actually stuck to a simple script of Vanny being a copycat of Afton and the primary antagonist of the game - no crazy virus robot BS necessary, no pointless hidden pizzarias or blobs, just back to the core of the series: a serial killer, innocent kids, and some haywire animatronics. That's literally all we needed.
@@puppiekit These statements make no fucking sense. No, the spider-man comparison doesn't make sense, since when the hell was it the same as trying to say all continuities of something are in the same universe? This is nowhere near the same, it's still in the same universe, but it's not trying to tell the literal exact same fucking story. The most that it connects is with some overlaps here and there, and that's it, (FFPS pizzeria under the Pizzaplex, obvious main animatronic characters, candy cadet and helpy, the Mimic copying Afton (for like...four games, three if we're not counting AR), the indie games, whatever's going on with the character of Nightmarionne, old animatronic parts in the Tangle, and the bonnie-mask bully from FNAF 4) Saying that THOSE somehow are proof of this statement of yours is bullshit, (we literally also have Vanny/Vanessa, Gregory/GGY, the Mimic, Cassie, Roxy, Monty, whoever it's likely implying is behind FE now, etc)
No it did not chicken out of shit, literally every single other modern FNAF product aside from SB has been an improvement in comparison to it. Which is also another good point, why'd you only ever bring up SB when talking about the story? Why didn't you mention, why'd you oh so conveniently leave out, HW1, AR (in terms of really only the emails), Ruin, HW2, the upcoming SOTM game (which we can prolly already tell a lot about), ITP- It's funny, people like you always only ever seem to ention SB's story specifically when talking about the new story, and then NOTHING ELSE. Why is that exactly?
No it isn't in a limbo, literally all the other fucking modern FNAF games are there around it. So moral of the story; Shut the fuck up, and stop trying to use one singular game that came out three years ago to try and prove a point about the modern story, even though the fucking story itself has already moved on. It is VERY obvious, when people like you clearly just purely nowadays base your whole view of modern FNAF off of SB, and that's it, and I don't what you seriously expect to gain from that. You just look fucking retarded, because you act like one thing that almost every other person that's not also doing that, has moved on from, is somehow still relevant and at that representative of the whole lore??
I like that you're not letting Scott off the hook. He's 100% complicit in this. That being said, I think he sort of admitted the game is bad? In the interview he said that they WANTED to make a good product which implies he doesn't consider it a good product.
Maybe in a weirdly roundabout way? But the quote I used is pretty overwhelming and clear-cut, you know? Yeah he recognized it went wrong, but I got the impression he was more referring to the story and covid. He's just as willingly unaware as Steel Wool and it's definitely not okay :)
@DesignFrameCaseStudies you make a good point for sure. I think the #1 problem in the games and movie industries is megalomania. Everything has to be the biggest thing ever and cost hundreds of millions of dollars and also appeal to everyone which makes it appeal to no one.
The big takeaway I'm getting from this boils down to the joke "how many therapists does it take to change a lightbulb? One, but the lightbulb has to want to change"
Until Steel Wool recognizes the issues with the games they've created, I firmly believe nothing will change, as sad to say as that is.
The "am I so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong!" shtick is EXACTLY what doomed Concord, and I can only pray Steel Wool can take a step back and look at themselves in the mirror before they suffer the same fate as Firewalk.
The whole "saves are disabled to increase difficulty" debacle really is some arcade-era thinking. Dark Souls is famous and infamous for its difficulty, even though it saves your game almost constantly (which even contributes to the difficulty in some aspects - you can't easily save-scum your level-up choices, for example). Eschewing saving can be a nice self-imposed challenge, but not every challenge can be a nice requirement.
I think it's even more insane than that, because really old games mostly didn't include saves because otherwise the game would be completed quickly, especially when cartridge space was so tiny and a single game was expected to last. So beating the game was the testament of mastery, sort of like modern day roguelites in a sense, except roguelites often include metaprogression and procedural generation to add short-term fresh experiences on top of the long-term mastery. SW has no reason to engage with that line of thinking whatsoever.
As an aspiring dev slowly working on my very first game, this is honestly a great dissertation and example of all the stuff I should not do with my project
Same here.
The Passion section was interesting because regardless of the type of person he is, Phisnom was cooking. Sws overplayed their hand because they got hype from Help Wanted.
I didnt like that Dawko was glazing so hard for SWS at that time, which im sure he felt he had to because he was so deep into the community.
I completely agree! I don't comment on Phisnom's character. He's just spot on with his Security Breach reality check.
Phisnom is the GOAT. All the other RUclipsrs have a financial stake in maintaining the facade of this franchise always being perfect because they have merch collabs with it. They are just shills at this point, sadly. The funny thing is they don't realize that ignoring the problems just means this series is gonna keep getting worse, they think ignoring the issues will help.
@@Korra228Phil might be a bit of a moron (I'll never forget his insanely stupid RoN take), but I'll give him this, he ain't no shill and he ain't afraid to speak his mind. There is something quite admirable about that, for better and for worse.
@@vinegar4556 RoN being?..
What is RoN?
I loved security breach solely because of how much love and passion steel wool had for this, they just couldn’t do what they wanted to. Over ambition with too big of a scope. The pizzaplex is a phenomenal location with so much love and care but they couldn’t do it. It just makes me upset when some people just shit on steel wool like they had no love because this game just BLEEDS passion. Also glad you used a lot of clips from Phil’s playthrough because this game started a domino effect that led to him losing his job for the fanverse initiative
Yeah, that's why I wanted to mention their passion, since at the same time, there's evidence pointing to a lack of care and laziness. It's a strange dichotomy. There's just so much wrong that it's overwhelming. Their passion can be seen, but it's covered up by mounds of their own doing. Any true leader who's a bit familiar with media projects would've seen it coming a mile away.
I agree that they worked too hard on the wrong things
Feels weird for me, when the gameplay experience is awful and the plot is shallow, and I look around and see all of the detail that's behind the Pizzaplex, I get mad because the atention to detail is in the wrong place
Which one is phil?
@@LanaLlama20 Phisnom
Thing is, the characters roaming the pizzaplex with increasingly more dificult mechanics as they get damaged, as you use some tools, limited battery freddy and the Faz cameras sounds amazing
But the pizzaplex is so big you would never encounter them... So they added the teleport, rendering the cameras inconsequential, thats why noone uses them
In conclusion, this game would honestly be incredible if the pizzaplex was smaller, no need to teleport, the pathfinding would have a much easier time to navigate, you would even encounter Vanny (yes, she roams the pizzaplex too)
Imagine just a (much) smaller hub, a character specific area to introduce new mechanics that the character can usilize, and you too (kitchen for chica, use pizzas and staffbots; monty golf for Monty, the croc distractiona, walkways monty can hop between but not you, and so on)
Then after each area, their mechanics change, Monty is more agressive and smaller, harder to track, maybe can crawl on small places like you, Chica is harder to hear and locate cuz of her voice, maybe doesnt get distracted as easier, and Roxy is blind, easier to distract but more agressive and cant be stunned
Staffbots could just allert the animatronics instead of teleporting
I feel like 10 years from now this game will be old enough for hobbyists to completely overhaul into a completely functional game PLUS reimplement all the cut content. We've seen it done before.
Maybe? The overhaul would be creating a brand new game from scratch, and that just wouldn't work with how the Pizzaplex is currently built. It might be possible with a huge team and several years, but no one would be dumb enough to go to that extent for free. Maybe someone will create their own game that's inspired but within a manageable scope and level. And the gameplay itself would need built from the ground up. Very little is salvageable.
@@DesignFrameCaseStudies"no one would be dumb enough to go to that extent for free" you underestimate the power of a fandom :')
This is already happening. A team are making Five Nights at Freddy’s Security Breach: Blast to the past, which is adding in a lot of cut content, new storyline stuff, overhauled graphics and UI, overhauled gameplay and more
@Owen01 I'd be curious as to how they handle it. I saw their teaser of the Daycare rework and it had some improvements but still some issues I noticed. But I don't think it's intended to be the full rework that the game requires.
@@DesignFrameCaseStudiesYea this screams Cyberpunk. Game is fundamentally flawed from the complete ground up. Nothing short of a complete start from scratch could save SB.
I loved Phantom Liberty but people glaze and shill Cyberpunk as if it still isn't devoid of content and features for an RPG. Exact same issue as SB. Overscoped. Except CDPR actually has proper game devs so at least the main story missions are fantastic albiet devoid of any branching
With Security Breach I sorta saw it as this rag tag bunch of indie devs who got in over their heads, admirable but ambitious underdogs, but I'd never heard the interviews included in this video and it really changed my perspective. There's a certain level of seemingly selective ignorance to this entire thing that is really difficult to watch coming from the highest players in the studio and I think surrounding yourself with only 'yes men' type of people who live and breathe the fandom uncritically is not going to actually help anything get any better. There are clearly very talented people involved in the making of this game, but that is not enough.
I say that with the utmost gentleness possible and as someone who genuinely wanted to see this studio knock it out of the park.
Honestly same!
I truly believe that the biggest problem with this game is its map size and all other problems would have disappeared if it weren't that big. It simply doesn't need to be this big at all.
And if they really needed to do an entire mall for it, they should have made it an actual mall and not this amphitheater - factory - studio amalgamation with Old Aperture - type underground section.
I think the gameplay is a big issue too, but the map is certainly the root cause. It's difficult to design gameplay and levels in a space that doesn't really support it. Thanks for watching! :)
I love how the tone of this video is very different to the first one. This one has this lowkey "It's been two years, I've had it with your nonsense Steel Wool." vibe to it and I love it. It's definitely earned.
I still regularly reference "NOOOO not the cactus", so I think that counts as an iconic channel moment
@@gavinislightning Ah, good one! 😂
EDITED.
something that isn't talked nearly enough about since the fanbase is 95% casuals and kids are the technical aspects of the game. it's terrible. just terrible. they're completely incompetent.
1. you can't choose resolutions above 1440p when set to fullscreen.
workaround: set to borderless fullscreen. the game will set itself to the windows resolution...but still won't show the correct resolution in the settings menu.
2. raytracing is unplayable on a 4090. fps are below 20fps and even below 10fps no matter the resolution. they didn't even try fixing the implementation.
workaround: use dlss. duh.
3. the game either doesn't use or uses a very bad raytracing denoiser. the noise burns your eyes out.
workaround: use dlss as a makeshift denoiser.
4. despite me mailing them multiple times they still didn't fix the broken dlss implementation. the settings are mismatched and i found that out via noticing strange fps and then proving my suspicion via checking nvidia's dlss indicator overlay.
workaround: choosing dlss balanced gives you dlss quality. performance and quality give you balanced and the performance setting doesn't exist in the game.
5. they never updated the stoneage dlss dll.
workaround: do it manually.
EDIT: 6: the game has fps black holes. looking at and/or standing in front of specific things makes the fps fall off a cliff and the frametimes graph freak out.
workaround: looking/going away fixes the fps. a good example for this is the broken bot at the start of ruin giving you the flashlight.
i also dmed you the list on twitter.
I thought I already replied but not sure what happened to it. I'm planning on mentioning a couple technical stuff next video, so I may use your comment as well! The Ruin frame black hole is also interesting. I'd like to mention that in the Ruin video I think. It's very strange...
@DesignFrameCaseStudies i deleted the old comment and reposted the edited one. were you able to reproduce one of those fps black holes? if yes, did you also see the frametime graph freaking out? for example via msi afterburner's overlay.
@@roflcopter3625 I haven't tried yet. I'll try it as soon as I record more Ruin stuff. It'd be a good idea if I tracked the frames of a game that didn't do that as well, for comparison. I think that'd be interesting.
I used to love the story of fnaf and was always excited to see what weird wacky place it'd go next. I didn't even mind the strange science fiction direction the series went in after Sister Location since I was mostly following the series for the camp that was treated overly seriously. Nothing about the nonsensical half assed attempt at re treading old stories going on in Security Breach captured my interest.
Even when the series went in a more high tech direction internal logic was kept. No super intelligent ai just possessed robots being the main thing that Security Breach completely ignored.
I can't even bring up the energy to care about the lore any more due to how badly Security Breach broke it. Even theories aren't fun anymore because (almost) every theory seems to be attempting to explain what tf happens in Security Breach. Learning that Scott didn’t communicate any of his ideas to Steel Wool was not surprising in the slightest.
Don't get me wrong the fnaf story was confusing long before this however even when it was confusing it was fun! Fnaf had a skelton that was up to the fans to build upon which is probably why fnaf ended up with such a vibrant creative fan base. There is nothing fun about speculating on a game without even a foundation of a story to go off of.
Ruins story was better but ANYTHING was better than what happened in Security Breach. Plus, if the main focus of a dlcs story is to retcon parts of the main game then you're probably doing something wrong.
Security Breach was the Sonic 06 of its year. The current sonic team suffers from a lot of the same managerial issues of Steel Wool Studios and you can see how it ends up in Sonic Frontiers when they try new concepts. Security Breach was a failure in so many ways that it cannot be fixed. It needs a full on redesign from scratch to end product.
1:42:15 I appreciate Siege being brought up, because that was the exact game I had in mind. To add to this, Siege's camera systems also include a ghostly view of your own character, it can be seen at any distance no matter where you are in the map, even for someone picking the game for the first time, it is fairly intuitive and easy to find oneself thanks to it.
Ah, crap, I would've brought that up if I played it again and noticed! I like Siege but didn't have time to play it again to record footage. Thanks for bringing that up!
I think my overall thoughts on this game can be best summarized by a certain review about another broken game from 2006:
“I didn’t want to hate this game. I have no ill will towards the people responsible for making it. The people over there have made some great content, and I can’t imagine the pressure one would feel trying to make a game as big and as ambitious as it tried to be. Still, I had to play this game. It was SOUL CRUSHING.”
Maybe I’m being too charitable in my outlook, but I can’t bring myself to even really be angry with Steel Wool. Maybe that’s because of my two years in game design that taught me a lot about the dangers of death by ambition without the experience or skill to back it up which makes it a bit more empathetic for whatever reason, or the fact that I’ve had a project of my own back during those classes which resulted in scope creep, albeit not to this extreme. (Of course, this doesn’t excuse the outright neglect of common, basic game design principles.)
Regardless, I’m just left disappointed and wondering what could’ve been under a smaller, more focused vision where scope creep didn’t bloat the game into a broken, unstable disaster.
Dang, it's been YEARS since I've watched those videos, and I could still hear that quote loud and clear in my head when I read that. Probably what got me into watching these kinds of deep analyses on how and why certain games were designed poorly
just from your pfp alone, I know exactly what you are talking about.
If Secret of the Mimic is another horrific mess, i genuinely hope all these bigger RUclipsrs like Fuhnaff and Dawko stop needlessly praising them so they can stay in good graces. It doesn't matter if you act nice to keep your industry ties if it makes everyone see you as a shill.
If you're making a location in a horror game and saying "I wanna go there" you must have 0 idea of what your job is and what you're doing.
I honestly think Scott and Steel Wool are lying about how they feel about Security Breach. All the stuttering they make and the made up words feels like they’re frantically trying to come up with a good lie and not admit that the game is a disaster to the public, because as broken as Security Breach is, it was a financial hit.
@@ItsMemeTimeBoi I kinda felt that at first, but there's just too much evidence for a lack of awareness or experience or ability to discern pretty much anything. The fact that Scott even said how lucky he was and how they didn't botch anything is incredible, and Jason's quote on not wanting to change anything feels like saving face, but it also feels so genuine. His answer gives me the feeling that he's not even capable of discerning the truth. It really boggles my mind.
@ I really hope that Secret Of The Mimic has a coherent narrative and good gameplay, I really don’t want to see this franchise crumble, I loved this franchise since 2014 and I don’t want too see it end like this. I doubt the gameplay will be bad, given the fact it’s a VR game which is Steel Wool’s strong suite, but I really REALLY hope the story is good, I doubt it tho 😭😭😭
Also, I kinda wish FNAF stays as like 2D games, point and click teams, and VR games, like smaller scale games. I don’t want FNAF to have big open worlds ever again unless it’s The Joy Of Creation, because when you look at Scott’s catalogue of games and his story, as well as Steel Wool’s catalogue of games, it’s enough to realize that a non Vr free roam game made by Scott and Steel Wool will not work in the slightest. It’s like the equivalent of a middle schooler trying to do calculus.
Also, Secret of the Mimic will support flat mode on release... so I'm gonna expect the game to hold up as a standard non-VR game haha
I can believe that Scott wouldn’t recognize the flaws. His own games mostly only succeed in atmosphere or aesthetics, if even that. He doesn’t strike me as the type to play many games to develop standards with, either.
i honestly havent really seen other people *talking* about how severe the scope creep of Security Breach was, so thank you for this.
I remember picking up on it through how the developers talked in their interviews before launch, they were so blissfully unaware of how bad what they were sayin sounded. And I was just hopeful that they weren't being as disorganized as their words came off... But then the game came out and the rest was history. sigh. Honestly I like the set design I like some of the character design, the therapist CDs were the main part of any lore in this that actually caught my interest... but it really didn't work as a game. There were too many important pieces missing with pretty flourishes shoved in to make it seem like there was no issue.
It's so insane how the most telling aspect of Steel Wool and Scott's attitude and refusal to take accountability can simply be seen from their in person/virtual interviews. They're ALWAYS with fans; with young people who aren't journalists or serious game developers and thus can't ask the important questions without fear or skill. This is best seen with Funaff because really, why would they pick him over other famous FNAF youtubers like MatPat or Jackscepticye? It's a clear case of insecurity that they're hiding by only interacting with those with less power than them. These guys can't face the heat and you show this pretty well in how you put interviews from other game developers and the maturity and distance they have towards the fanbase and interviewer. You can truly see the fear Steel Wool and Scott has because they know that they would've been ripped to shreds if they were interviewed by anyone who knows what they're talking about and is powerful enough to not be scared to criticize them
honestly, I feel like even Dawko softballs his interview questions-Scott and Steel Wool don’t just seem to take advantage of the fact that they’re being interviewed by less experienced fans like Funaff, but fans like Dawko also go easy on them *constantly*. I’ve never seen Dawko actually press Scott for answers, and both he and Fuhnaff ask so many of the same generic questions. like, do you really think you’re the first person to ask Scott “what was working on the movie like?”
edit: remembered that Dawko has a much more vested interest in staying on Scott’s good side due to the fact he actively releases FNAF merch now, so I suppose it’s a lot to expect that he’d be neutral… but still.
100%! Well said.
The subtle Fuhnaff shade lmfao
I think Steel Wool needs to be told that while there are artists in game development, they're very different to artists in say the movie industry. Or even the illustration industry.
Its not a one size fits all. Case and point.
Because artists do play a role in good gameplay and level design.
But you need to think very differently to making a background for a movie.
And that mindset shift just isnt there. It shows. And it does such a disservice to the artist that help make games what they are
33:53
Fun Fact: Spotlight Monty was supposed to get down and chase the player. But due to a bug, he was removed before release. His old AI can still be activated if you unload the Atrium, even by walking away
ruclips.net/video/omcuNAdjkpg/видео.html
Our boi Giga Monty
Someday I hope Scott and Steel Wool go back and make what Security Breach was supposed to be. No giant mall too big for its own good, less time on the detailing and more on the coding, and the proper story.
I'm hoping there's a minimalist security breach fan remake or something like that, not just because this game was a disappointment but because it'd be nice to actually be able to play the game as a low end PC user, still can't believe this game takes up like 80 GB...
I really wish someone would just flatten this game, I know a lot of people have thought of ways to improve the game and that's cool and all but I just want it to be *small.* Like the Scratch remakes of the early games.
@@theflyingspagetidk if it ever could cause even if we look at the original plans for the game 2-3 floors is still pretty big, especially with the detailing of the Pizzaplex, and making it smaller than that really just makes the Pizzaplex any other small Freddy location.
Duuude I literally rewatched your sb analysis like yesterday and now I see this! You really make great videos. Keep it up!
Thank you for the support! Enjoy! :)
1:43:46 In regards to that, FNAF 2 actually does have a second mechanic to use the cameras - in that flashing animatronics stuns them for a short period of time.
However, the problem with that mechanic is Scott barely even mentions it existing ingame. The only time this idea is referenced is during Night 2's call.
"Those older models would always get disoriented with bright lights. It would cause a system restart, or something. Uh, come to think of it, you might want to try that on any room where something undesirable might be. It might hold them in place for a few seconds. Uh, that glitch might have carried over to the newer models too."
Even if the player becomes aware of this mechanic, the Music Box becomes so polarizing in later nights, that (outside of special strategies like Minus 7), the player won't actually utilize or otherwise forget the mechanic exists.
I thought that was only for Foxy's mechanic?
@@DesignFrameCaseStudiesFoxy's mechanic is that you have to flash him in the hallway since the mask doesn't work on him, and flashing the lights sends him back. For the other withered animatronics, I believe it just stalls their movement, and they can be stalled in the cameras
@kwisowofer9872 That's really funny; I had no idea. There's so much to unpack with the past games haha.
Not gonna lie, I always thought they should've taken more inspiration from Alien: Isolation than just the save stations and other miscellaneous stuff, like a more unpredictable AI, for example. Obviously, you don't have to reach the complexity of the Xenomorph to be engaging and threatening, but at least to where you're genuinely on edge throughout the game, Monty is like the only enemy in the game where I'm like, "Oh shit," because not only can he not be impeded by anything you throw at him, he also runs faster than you as well, which incentivizes stealth to get by.
Right now, the game feels like Alien: Isolation Lite, especially since there's little to no tension aside from the genuinely scary chase music and the thumping footsteps of the animatronics behind you. With RUIN, I admittedly didn't bother completing it, because 1) slower movement speed and 2) the even more scripted-ness and linearity of it all meant fewer opportunities to get random enemy encounters and use strategy to win. Currently, I'm trying to make a mod for base SB that allows the AI to have actual unpredictable roaming instead of being tethered to simple and small patrol points, only deviating from them if they either see you or are checking a hiding spot. Perhaps I'll include it with that Harder AI mod I made one time ago.
dude this is a DISASTER, how did steel wool even make the moderately competent help wanted games?? every part of security breach is completely wasted by these silly storytellers who couldn't tell a story in a game marketed for children.
They are a vr developer and then they decided to make a non vr game and had no experience with it and this was the result
To be fair, we currently know that Scott Cawthon did the opposite of helping them with the story, but the story they made is...still not great?
This is what happens when you have no central focus. This is what managers are for, getting everyone on the same page and reining everyone in *before* scope creep tears them all apart. I know we as a society fucking hate meetings but this game would have been a thousand times better if they all just sat down and had a meeting and got all their ducks in a row.
I don't like Security Breach, I never have and have always considered everything past UCN to be completely non-canon. But that doesn't mean Steel Wool are completely evil or incompetent for making it, this is just another Icarus situation. I don't know if you've ever met this kind of dreamer, but there's a lot of them out there, they have big ideas and big hopes and they believe if they work hard enough they can make something great, and then you toss ten of those dreamers in room together and try and get them to work and it just tears apart the project because they're all too passionate about making their vision. This almost always ends up with a project being abandoned or everyone getting so burnt out that they just half ass whatever's left and give up.
I don't know if I can make you agree, but to me Security Breach is a tragedy.
@@zlbproductions7340 Yeah i feel like it’s on both Scott for not communicating with Steel Wool telling them the story, and Steel Wool making the pizzaplex unnecessarily big with no purpose, while trying to make sense of things Scott told them to add with no context without stopping to ask what and why, it seems like Scott kinda hasn’t learned either from the release of Into the Pit, in Dawko’s interview he mentioned leaving Mega Cats to develop the game for 6 months before he checked in or they went to him with a game bigger than initially intended
Help wanted is an anthology of games that already existed that they didn’t make with any original content being minigames at best. Help Wanted 2 is entirely minigames. It feels like playing Mario Party in the mode that’s just the minigames, or WarioWare. VR has always been more of a gimmick than anything so it’s not surprising they don’t know how to make an actual full game.
30:48 I so wish Pizzaplex was more like this. Realistically functional as an in-universe attraction
The design of the place was so bullshit that people theorized that the events of the story HAD to be distorted by Gregory's childhood perception.
Edit: WAIT *FOUR* MOUTHS BEFORE RELEASE!???? WTF????
Thank you so much for bringing up motion tracker from alien isolation. Besides what you said, it even subtly hints the direction where you're supposed to go with line at the border, so that you don't have to look at the map a single time to figure out where you need to go. Even though it is a pretty closed-environment game most of the time, devs still cared. Needless to say, other parts of this 20-hour game are as polished as this one. Still one of the best horror games of all time.
Even better, yeah! Thanks for bringing that up!
2:12:00 There's also just, absolutely no point in Alien:Isolation where the game expects you to go on hours without a save. 20-30 minutes sure, which I think is perfectly reasonable.
20-30 is excessive, but I don't think Alien has you going that long without a save thankfully haha. Even if the manual saves serve a purpose, it's still difficult to really nail the right pacing and feeling behind it.
The fact that theyre a team of "story telling artists", but then they did burntrap.
They looked at fnaf 6, saw the henry monologue ending, and just said "okay, whatever, LETS BRING EM BACK AGAIN!!" Then retconned burntrap to *not* be Afton cuz everyone and their mother was upset.
Thats honestly the thing that pisses me off the most. The fnaf 6 ending and Henry's speech is one of the most geniunely amazing finales to a series ive ever seen, and i can still get CHILLS just from watching it again, even after all these years.
And just... seeing them sort of spit in fnaf 6's face like this is the saddest thing ever. Ive been a fan of fnaf for years of my life, it was my childhood, and from fnaf 6 onward, since steel wool got involved, Ive basically lost all interest because of how stupid and bad games have gotten since... The ai approach is fucking stupid, and the mimic is NOT scary. I do not fucking care for the guy like i cared for Afton.
I think Scott is a big reason for that afton fiasco, but I think it's fair to hold both of them accountable for it. It's SW's game, after all haha
I saw this 2+ hour video thinking holy crap this SB Ruin video is gonna be wild, little did I realize that Ruin video is actually an upcoming video and this is just doubling down on how bad the original base game was and still is. A few times the Ruin case study was mentioning in this video and I thought "ah, must be the second half of the video" but nope, hahaha. Anyway, love to see this much more in-depth look at how bad things really were and why - finally someone calling out Steel Wool on how bad their practices are, how crazy Scott is to keep working with them, and how much hubris they exude.
Can't wait to rewatch this once a month like the original just to remind myself how incompetent Steel Wool are.
p.s., It's crazy how most people slurp up the slop that is their VR games and think everything is good. I played the second one and it's got so many crazy bad UX design choices in it, like did no one play test this???
I honestly wouldn't know about the VR in particular since it's outside of my area. Maybe once I own a VR set. And I'll be checking out SotM flat mode.
I hope you like the next videos as well! Thank you for watching! I appreciate you :)
Oh my god, I just realized that too. I can't wait for the Ruin video
One major thing about steel wool that grinds my gears, im writing this before I watch the video so sorry if this is mentioned, is how it seems like literally ALL the devs in steel wool have the opposite tastes in the games as fans. Like in the interview with Fuhnaff they mentioned how they loved sister location, pizza sim, and the cartoony style and cheesy jokes and vibe it has, honestly that was very telling, and not to mention they said help wanted 1 was too scary? Like idk if I'm just a big boy or something but help wanted 1 was NOT scary at all, it was tense and stressful for like nights 1 and 2 when I first played then it was just eh whatever. I really hate it and I don't wanna be mean, but they just aren't fit for a good future for fnaf, i don't think fnaf will ever be scary again, into the pit was a good step forward to bringing the horror back (not really but kind of) but that game took like what 4 or 5 years of development and it wasn't even steel wool just mega cat i think they're called? It's a shame, scott chose great vr devs but handing the games off to them as much as he did was a bad move.
I've thought the same thing. Steel Wool just seems like a terrible choice for the series, tonally. Sister Location and Fnaf 6 did have that balance, but SW have gone overboard with the goofiness. Keep in mind, the only vaguely tense parts of Help Wanted 1 are the parts where they just remade the classic games (and even that, they arguably screwed up, with things like the new Springtrap model.)
The goofiness is going to kill the series as it loses all of its charm from its spooky atmosphere and becomes just another mascot horror franchise.
I didn’t even like Help Wanted 1 from how they butchered the 3 main games; Freddy lost all spook factor in 1 and you could control Foxy making him no longer a threat. They massacred the 2nd game by removing a massive chunk of the threats for most of the nights and completely breaking the gameplay, turning it into a joke. You could practically keep your mask on the whole night. And 3 is 3, but somehow worse.
They couldn’t even program the fucking doors for those offices in SB correctly; so when you run out of power, the doors are set to the opposite state instead of open. How do you even do that?!
Honestly for some reason I feel like Ruin and base SB shouldn't have been 2 separate parts, but one whole game in its entirety. Imagine the game starting with this glamorous and shiny pizzaplex that falls to literal ruin as the story progresses, turning from an exploration-like gameplay loop into a more linear experience as the pizzaplex gets destroyed by the end of it?
That'd be a cool way to dynamically change the environment, if the Pizzaplex was so much smaller haha 😄
I know something that perfectly applies to Security Breach.
"I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're, that you're using here. It didn't require any discipline to attain it. You know, you read what others had done, and you, and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses, uh, to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew it, you had, you've patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunch box, and now you're selling it, you wanna sell it. You were so preoccupied with whether or not you could, you did stop to think if you should."
- Ian Malcom, Jurassic Park
I thought Comedy Bot was way funnier when it was broken. Having the big announcement for the comedy stylings of Comedy Bot, followed by silence, was actually hilarious.
Your channel is a gem. You’re dissecting games in a manner I don’t really see much on RUclips. This is something that really interests me. I like that you go into the game design and also dive into the possible mindset and attitude that goes on deeper in the developer’s minds behind these decisions. Game developer or not, I’m sure we can take something away from these tales as lessons for our personal lives
Thank you so much! It means a lot to hear that you value this channel. I'm very excited for the projects I have lined up :)
@@DesignFrameCaseStudieslooking forward to it! You also happen to cover a lot of more niche games I care about.
I’ve watched your Luigi’s Mansion video already. And I think your thoughts on the common ghost battles in 3 lacking depth is pretty interesting! I’ve always felt that the fighting in 3 felt the least satisfying in the whole series but couldn’t put it into words why.
Looking forward to your cuphead DLC analysis video too (genuinely super excited). I think I’ll watch it once I’m done playing through base game cuphead and dlc. I’m playing it with a friend. So far I barely have any idea of what the DLC is like so I think experiencing it first hand and then hearing your thoughts will be super fun!
Really glad I ended up somehow coming across this channel
Much love
@@cuber759 ❤️
Since they mentioned Alien Isolation, there's an interesting comparison you should touch on at some point. Cause Alien Isolation was made by Creative Assembly, a game studio known more for the Total War series, which are strategy games. Alien Isolation was them switching it up from their usual mold, not unlike Steel Wool and SB. Yet unlike SW, CA was able to make a better game. Could be something to explore.
I still stand by my theory after all these years that the original concept for Security Breach was a completely open world where the player had 6 real time hours to defeat the Glamrock animatronics or survive until morning, Dead Rising style. This makes sense too when you consider all the "Walk to somewhere far away" objectives and that the average first playthrough for this game is charted at 5-8 hours, suggesting that the game's content was carefully crafted to be completeable in approximately 6 hours. There's a lot of cut content to support this but overall I think the biggest thing that supports my theory is just the massive scale of the Pizzaplex to begin with. It is unnecessarily huge unless the whole point of it is that it's so large that it takes a long time to traverse, putting pressure on the player's resource of time. Combine that with a lot of the cut mechanics and even a lot of the mechanics that actually shipped in the game (like security bot patrols and the security office challenges) and you can start to get this picture that Security Breach was dreamed up as a non-linear Metroidvania of a horror game that fell apart because of many of the factors you've outlined in your video.
Security Breach always felt like a game that choked to death on it's own ambition and it's nice to see this video dive into some of that.
Huge maps tend to be a mistake that new developers make. It's a bit surprising that a team with games under their belt did it. Though I guess AAA empty open world games have been in vogue recently so it's probably not fair to call it a new developer problem any more.
What bothers me about the Pizzaplex size is also the fact that it must be SO EXPENSIVE to build and maintain a place like that, Disneyworld levels of expensive. Yet it exists in the FNAF universe, somehow. Somehow, a pizzeria brand gathered enough money throughout the years to build a place like that, and its just too ambitious and expensive to be believable in a lore kind of way. All the space it takes, all the construction funds, all the food expenses, staff bots, energy consumption the whole place must require, I just don't buy it. An Amusement Park would be more believable than what the Pizzaplex is. I'm convinced they just wanted to make something grand and impressive to the eyes while paying very little attention to logic or if it made sense to the FNAF lore.
I can even give Scott and Steel Wool a pass to the "extremely advanced AI" Animatronics because it's been already established in the FNAF universe that technology is way more advanced than in the real world, but I drew the line with the Pizzaplex. It's just too unbelievable. They should have scaled it down imo
But as you've shown in the video they were thinking too big and didn't give enough care to what was supposed to make sense, logistics and all of that.
the pizzaplex really reminds me of those super elaborate entertainment venues from the 90's, like Disney quest and the Sega arcades. Those went out business due to many of the issues you brought up (and also because of fast technological progress quickly outdating the attractions offered by them. But thats besides the point.).
Even then, the pizzaplex somehow feels way too big even for that kind of place!
I 100% this game last week cause it was free on Playstation and oh my god how are things STILL not fixed??
@serbidian7140 They made their money and people hype them up regardless. There's no reason for them to fix anything, unfortunately. That's one reason this video exists!
@@serbidian7140 wait it WAS free? On the PS store?
Steel Wool doesn't seem to realize we're not laughing with them, we're laughing at them.
This truly is the Morbius of video games
Another incredible video dissecting SB - Sharing this around everywhere I can, and I am so unbelievably excited for the RUIN analysis. Hopefully, SW can actually see this video and understand what you're trying to tell them here. They really need to get more people on their management team who really understand gaming, to help balance out their artistic side with design knowledge and technical ability. I really hope they've learnt their lessons there and have improved for the upcoming Secret of The Mimic, as that game really needs to be a landmark release for the franchise at this point.
Thank you so much, Arty! I greatly appreciate you :) I said this in the video but I hope SW or Scott take this seriously, or at least the fan base. I really feel like this video was necessary.
Congrats on your work on Playtime with Percy! That voice acting fit so well. If there are future projects you're working on that could use a second pair of eyes, send them to me ;) I would love to be a part of some cool projects! It's insane that they never sold Percy on Steam though haha
@DesignFrameCaseStudies thank you so much!!! I'm glad you enjoyed my work in PWP haha that was a nice surprise. A steam release is actually coming!! Sometime next year probably.
And in terms of new projects... Who knows....
Regardless, great video, super excited for the RUIN essay!
I think part of why Scott stuck with Steel Wool is because he wanted to nurture an indie and also entrust only a single development studio to the IP for all future releases. Basically like mentoring a successor.
That makes sense, but entrusting a company with a million red flags before and after SB was a terrible idea haha
At least something like Cuphead and it's dlc, while flawed in many ways, is a finished game with a vision that had the intent of making something fun that I was able to enjoy despite it's shortcomings, Security Breach is just infuriating to play from start to finish.
1:08:15 "They had the passion, they just did not have a brain" is Security Breach in a nutshell
I also appreciate that you are not hating on Steel Wool and want them to improve
I’ve always been saddened by Security Breach, and even Help Wanted 2 now. Help Wanted to me was a masterpiece, it set such high expectations for me on what was coming next…. Which was a whole load of nothing…. Well, a whole load of hilarious Markiplier vids, which I can’t complain about.
37:30 On the Phisnom section, is that the Transistor soundtrack I'm hearing? I may be wrong, but it sounds so much like it. I adore Supergiants' music, and the Transistor soundtrack has a dear place in my heart.
Yep! One of my favorite games :)
@@DesignFrameCaseStudies If I have to guess, It's Signals? It's a song about hopelessness in a situation, no matter what youdo
@@Max128ping I didn't pay mind to the lyrics but that's sort of fitting, ain't it? lol (But not really, the situation could have been managed). But I use many tracks from Transistor. I can put the specific ones used in the description if requested.
The perfect counter to the godawful atrium is the design of the Nezumi Labs storage rooms in Lost in Vivo. There is one enemy that only moves when you aren't looking in its general direction, and there is a point where a previously open area the size of a cafeteria turns into a maze of boxes. The whole sequence is claustrophobic, disorienting and butt puckering. Steel Wool can learn a lot from Akuma Kira's games overall. Even his larger areas in Lunacid (some of which are meandering paths suspended in instakill voids) are broken up in a way that makes sense.
I'll check it out! Thank you for sharing! :)
@@DesignFrameCaseStudies would love to see an analysis of Kira's games, he started out with Spooky's Jumpscare Mansion and consistently puts out bangers
Not even the animatronics like walking around the atrium
🤣
security breach, despite being developed by artists, really suffers from being not immersive. it doesn't how matter how lovingly crafted the game's assets are, having gregory be the locus of interaction for the player completely destroyed my ability to immerse myself in the game world. because gregory is a kid, the camera is placed low the ground, too low, such that everything feels out-of-scale. the basic barriers that the developers haphazardly place around the world are taller than the player, as are the glass guardrails, and the handrails on the escalators. this might not be so bad if everything was this large, but other assets, such as the photo booths, seem unusually small. if you compare the size of the photo booths and the guardrails at 41:38, you can see that the curtain of the photo booth is barely taller than the guardrail. for reference, the height of the average 10 year-old is 4'10, and a good reference for how high off the ground a handrail for a staircase is is roughly 36 inches. even if gregory was only 4 feet tall, he should still be comfortably taller than these basic assets that provide a subconscious sense of scale for the space. these scaling inconsistencies happen repeatedly and work to destroy immersion as you play. it seems evident to me that the asset designers did not have a standard scale for how large things should be, or failed to factor in the differences in feeling from viewing the world of a game through a character, and actually seeing in the real world.
there's also smaller details-- the escalators placed all over the world are nonfunctional, and you can sprint up and down stepped parts of the world at full speed. i know it sounds crazy to suggest that traversing the world be made even slower, but when you're trying to build an atmospheric experience, these small immersive details are incredibly important. there also could have been some interesting gameplay strategy involved with playing around staircases and different elevation, but i think it's pointless to talk about in detail, because security breach has fundamental flaws that wouldn't have been alleviated by getting a speed boost from running up an escalator.
the pizzaplex also just doesn't FEEL like a scary location. all of the lights are on, and these banal security robots are placed randomly instead of the actually scary main animatronics. i'm willing to concede that this mostly an ethereal complaint-- similar to saying "what if the game was cool and scary actually," reading more as inspiration than actual criticism. critiquing the fundamentals of the art direction is difficult because you can't say objectively how "good" it is. however, it still detracted from my experience and made the game less scary.
1:18:28 this is the kind of belief you develop when you're trying to internally justify to yourself why you don't need to go back and fix something. i hate psychoanalyzing people, but i really think that this guy is really lost in the cope. his product sucked, and he doesn't want to have to internalize that fact. even if security breach was just spotty or ragged at the edges, it should still bother someone, a professional who cares, that the game has even minor issues. the recently published half-life 2 documentary has the developers talking about things they wish they had done differently, things that they admit are janky, because they're professional artists who are able to acknowledge when they make mistakes, and communicate them publicly in order to contribute positively to the development of their medium. half-life 2 is an incredible game, widely well-received, and despite that, its creators are still able to objectively evaluate the degree to which they succeeded in communicating the ideas that they wanted to communicate.
Best comment :)
Honestly, I do hope SB can be seen as a cautionary tale for the future, the same vein as Sonic 06 and Fallout 76. I honestly don't have a problem with them loving the game, but the fact that they don't seem as aware of the issues as the rest of us...well, it's something that should be looked into.
Nice video! Definitely looking forward to future videos involving SB, as I have mentioned before that I do love the game, but I do wanna learn even more about it's history!
That's exactly why I think this video was so important to release. It's the crazy lack of awareness and attitude (and inability to implement decent design changes or seemingly display integrity or care, etc.) that concerns me more than anything, from both them and Scott, and people need to be aware of the state of the franchise. There's certainly nothing wrong with liking the game, it's entertaining and fascinating for sure, but it should be for the right reasons and with a respectful awareness.
This was the video I was waiting for.
Definitely a pretty spot-on description of things.
❤️
Thanks for making another SB video!! I regularly watch the first one (sometimes to fall asleep to XD)
@@JustLisaLisa1706 I hope you like this one as well 😁 Thank you for the support!
The game is so broken that the "glitchless" category for speedruns doesn't exist. It's called "skipless"
Boy that first Security Breach vid was comfort food for me, glad it got a followup haha
Thank you for watching and enjoying! I appreciate you :)
At some point, game designers and players both have managed to convince themselves that an Open World's value is primarily its size. Just the sheer vastness of the space you're allowed to wander and the scenery you can see. Players have realized there's more to it than that, but I feel like devs have forgotten there's more to it than just size and things to look at. I feel like devs are prone to use an open world improperly now more than ever. Security Breach is just one example of a sadly growing list.
Our king has returned
Also, 7 minutes in and this is BRUTAL so far
@scientific_guy Haha thanks for the support! I hope you enjoy it!
42:44 With the power of Remenant, it would seem one of Steelwools few playtesters have been trapped inside the game as Gregory.
So wait, let me get this straight…the players said "The cameras have no real use in the game, so we never use them while playing", and Steel Wool's takeaway was "Players aren't using the cameras?! Let's throw in an extra tutorial on how to use them so they don't have an excuse not to use them!"? I…am speechless. The more I learn about this game and its development, the more appalled I am.
Speaking as a creative storyteller myself, I understand getting caught up in a vision, and I respect a team that wants to maintain artistic integrity, I do, truly I do…but there's staying true to your art, and there's refusing to learn your art better. I know the instinctive feeling of wanting to protect and defend your babies, but your babies won't grow if you coddle them. You need to internalize a certain amount of negative feedback in order to improve as an artist; if you insist that you're perfect and anyone who disagrees is just wrong, that's not artistic integrity, that's narcissism.
In the current era, where a lot of creatives are being exploited and suppressed in big media companies, I feel like there's an increased defensiveness amongst them - a mentality of "It may be just a little criticism now, but where do we draw the line? If we let people control our artistic vision even a little, we're opening the floodgates for them to just mold our work into something that doesn't even resemble what we were trying to make!" But just as there's a difference between criticism and hate, there's a difference between quality control and corporate tyranny. Stay true to your vision, yes, but let other people guide you towards expressing your vision in a way your audience will appreciate. Seriously, if any fellow creative types read this: your art is precious, but common folk won't understand it the way you do, and you need to meet them halfway in how you present it.
All of this reminds me of how the original collapse of the video game industry decades ago, though often blamed on one particular game, was actually due to several factors, and one of those was a lack of quality control - people were just making whatever games they wanted and publishing them, and that wore the public's patience thin to the point that the one game in question managed to shatter it. What's more, the resurrection of the video game industry was partly due to the introduction of quality control, in which Nintendo had a standard games had to adhere to before they could be published on their new "entertainment systems" - games that simply didn't work weren't allowed to be published, which won the public's trust, allowing the industry to boom. These are lessons we've already learned IN THIS SPECIFIC MEDIUM'S HISTORY. Which…at the end of the day, sadly, is comforting, actually - we've been here before, and we figured it out, so there's reason to believe we'll get there again. It sucks that we have to do this all over again and relearn everything, but that kind of feels like the standard for everything in the world right now, so…I'm resigned to it. V_V
I also want to apologize for being so wordy; this is just how I am. If anyone bothered reading this, I appreciate you and wish you all the best. :)
@@Wandergirl108 Absolutely spot on! Thank you for writing this and for your insight! :)
Okay, I'm at the beginning, and I will watch the video in full and post another comment with my takeaway.
However, a large open space getting constricted to tell a specific story does not preclude using that space again in a different way.
I am a writer. When revisiting a location, it SHOULDN'T be the same. If its the same, WHY are we HERE? The point of introducing a setting where anything seems possible is to then restrict it and tell the story of people reacting to that restriction.
Keys To The Kingdom is a great literature example, the books take place in maybe 4 key locations, but all of those locations changes drastically as the story progresses. The hospital becomes a death trap when the military shows up to enforce quarentine. The protag's house becomes unfamiliar and depersonalized as he develops into a new being. The school starts out as an obligation but comes to feel like a hostage situation.
And then there's The House. A metaphysical location that is the heart of the universe, shuffling and changing and morphing while keeping records of all of existance.
And its dying.
Without change and restriction, the story wouldn't have been half as interesting.
I’m gonna be honest. I love the open world aspect of SB. The pizzaplex feels so alive, like it has sooooo much little details that makes it feel like an actual functioning building.
And that's great! But it's not a game, and so little of it is interactive, so it's not very interesting and becomes bland quite quickly to me and to those who were playing it as a game, you know? And some details are strangely lacking, like words on the plaques of museum items in Rockstar Row.
@ yeah there definitely are areas like those that hinder the game. I get it!
I just mean there is a lot of environmental story telling that tells little stories.
Learning that the main 3 creative/executive leads are animation people (and mainly lighting/vfx) instantly made the break down that happened click for me. As much as the heads of sw worked at pixar or are good enough animators to get hired right out of school, at the end of the day they arent story people and as such they arent going to be using gameplay to push story either. The fetch quest after fetch quest gameplay totally makes sense to me now because thats the easiest to write when you arent a story person/have very little experience writing story for game.
Like, not to knock down any of the extremely skilled lighting and vfx people but theres a reason that storyboard artists and writers are typically promoted to director/creative lead/head of story roles on animation projects and not vfx people. The mode of thinking is completely different from one another which is why you get this gorgeous environment (when it loads properly lol) with very little substance. The leads at sw focus is on the glitz and the glamour and not necessarily the gameplay (and by extension story) of the project because its literally NOT IN THEIR TRAINING.
The fact that they DIDNT bring in anyone with actual game dev experience is baffling but it lines up what you said about how the people at sw are unable to acknowledge their own shortcomings. It was honestly going to be a disaster the moment "open world exploration" was put into any of their heads cuz to me it sounds as if the team only ever yes and'd everyones ideas
100% spot on! Very good insight here. Thank you for watching and the support! :)
I genuinely want them to do a remaster/reboot and mostly just clean up what they have and make the game they wanted to make.
That'd require a rework, including reworking the Pizzaplex itself. I don't think they're capable of that anyway, from the evidence I've seen thus far...
"We're a small team."
The entire franchise was created by one guy. Maybe don't draw attention to that.
I mean Scott used click team and made the og games as still image's with few animation. Which is very different from an actual 3D game.
This video opened my eyes to a lot of problems that I wasn't aware of the breadth of, and I think you gave many salient points. As someone who tends to enjoy things more than the layman would, often despite any noticeable flaws, and who often avoids negative criticism of media I enjoy for personal reasons, I give you huge props for creating a video fascinating and well-composed enough for me to watch for any considerable amount of time.
However, I feel as though if your goal was to reach the attentions, minds, and/or hearts of the developers as you stated at the beginning of your video, then I'm worried you may not be successful. Granted, I am also probably more sensitive than the average internet user, but I found the general tone of this video to be very mocking, particularly in its editing style. Your decision to repeat peoples' lines right after they said them throughout the video, for example, and the way in which you did so, seemed from my subjective viewpoint to be at the expense of those people instead of for them. Choices like that just sort of gradually wore down on me. It's at the point where as just a fan of parts of Steel Wool's games sitting at around the halfway mark of your runtime, I'm uncomfortable enough with the vibes of this video that I don't think I'm going to finish watching it. I can imagine that an individual from Steel Wool might react even more aversely.
Again, this is my subjective opinion. I'm sorry for any rudeness or impropriety in my comments, and I'm also sorry for closing myself off to the latter half of the video and depriving you of an opportunity to change my mind. There is definitely something to be said for me developing a thicker skin, especially as someone interested in the creative process. Regardless, I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors, and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week!
There may be mocking but it's for entertainment purposes, and if it's at their expense, it's by their own making, since I make sure to provide overwhelming evidence for each point. For those who care for the franchise, enough is enough. I'm not going to attack them, but I'm not going to coddle them either. With that said, I respect your decision! There's a ton in this video and a range of topics in the latter half, such as their design changes from their patches, if you decide to return.
59:55 “Watched as the ingredients caught not just the pot, but the entire kitchen on fire”
I mean to be fair, that’s kinda on brand for Scott
🤣
@@DesignFrameCaseStudies Nice to see that you think so too.
Love your videos btw.
@@LT-sy3on Thank you! I appreciate you :)
hah! wouldnt be the first or last time scott made a mistake with placing aspects of the series with incompitent or bad people.