"It's with a heavy heart that we announce that FEZ II has been cancelled and is no longer in development. We apologize for the disappointment"
That wasn't something I had expected to hear this morning. But yeah, Fez 2 has been cancelled. It seems this has been brewing for sometime and recently came to a head for Phil Fish, creator of Fez. I don't want to outline the series of events here, there are plenty of gaming websites dedicating themselves to cataloging each bit of information. If you are interested in reading more, i'll provide a link.
That said, it seems Phil Fish is leaving gaming entirely and I find that sad. I saw Indie Game: The Movie and he seemed like a guy very concerned with making the best game he could. I wonder how well I would do under similar circumstances myself, but I think the final product speaks for itself, Fez is a beautiful game.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2422377,00.asp
I hope this doesn't effect Fez coming to OSX or Linux, it would make this whole thing even more unfortunate.
** EDIT 7/29/2013 ** Polytron has confirmed, Fez will still be ported to Mac and Linux. Very happy to see this. https://twitter.com/Polytron/statuses/361976275088310272
That wasn't something I had expected to hear this morning. But yeah, Fez 2 has been cancelled. It seems this has been brewing for sometime and recently came to a head for Phil Fish, creator of Fez. I don't want to outline the series of events here, there are plenty of gaming websites dedicating themselves to cataloging each bit of information. If you are interested in reading more, i'll provide a link.
That said, it seems Phil Fish is leaving gaming entirely and I find that sad. I saw Indie Game: The Movie and he seemed like a guy very concerned with making the best game he could. I wonder how well I would do under similar circumstances myself, but I think the final product speaks for itself, Fez is a beautiful game.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2422377,00.asp
I hope this doesn't effect Fez coming to OSX or Linux, it would make this whole thing even more unfortunate.
** EDIT 7/29/2013 ** Polytron has confirmed, Fez will still be ported to Mac and Linux. Very happy to see this. https://twitter.com/Polytron/statuses/361976275088310272
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First of all, I'll say that I *really* hope he changes his mind. Fez is awesome, and I'd love more of it.
I'll also say that Marcus Beer seems like the last person I'd want to have a beer with.
I'll also say that criticism is far too rampant. He doesn't deserve at least half of what he gets. So I'm sad that I'm about to add some more...
Phil Fish's ego is incredibly fragile. This has been a problem for him since Fez was first shown. He can't handle any kind of criticism. There are some comments you ignore, and others you respond to, and when you respond you do so in a way that doesn't invite more trolling. With Phil it's just one shitstorm after another.
He went so far as to tell a man to kill himself, this is not how adults act, especially adults in the public eye.
That said, in general I'm sympathetic to him, and the reasons he and Blow were called out were ridiculous. Jonathan Blow, who's (correctly nor not) notorious for being arrogant, handled this very maturely. He made a dig at the absurdity of it without getting insulting, etc.
So come on Phil. We love your game, and we'd love to see more from you. Just stay off Twitter and let the other employee at Polytron handle the PR.
I think a secondary point that may be as important is:
Game journalism sucks!
Seriously, the coverage from most outlets, and the original "journalism" that started this mess are a decent indicator of the problems in journalism.
Journalists asking "hey would you like to comment on this thing we don't know all the details about yet?" enough times for Fish and Blow to get annoyed shows this pretty well.
I agree with your point on game journalism lacking. Beer's entire rant was that Fish and Blow suck because they didn't respond to some XBox story in the way he wanted. It seemed for him that was a horrible situation that needed to be called out.
His priorities are messed up.
And I also agree with you about not calling for people to die in an argument. Lets all stay alive out there.
I'd also have to add (having shipped several games myself), that you just have to toughen up. Someone always hates what you make, and you just hope someone else loves it. The worst thing possible is for people to not care at all.
And really, with every title I shipped, the external critics were *way* more tolerant than we were to our own creations. Shipping a game (shipping any product) is incredibly hard. It never meets your expectations, it's never what you had envisioned and could always be made better with a bit more tweaking. Shipping involves putting a stake in the ground and saying, "here's what we have" and releasing something good enough that a group of people will love it. It's painful. The compromises are painful to even get to that point. There's never enough time/money/resources to get it perfect, so you shoot for great and limit scope. There's always the goal you had in your head sticking around poking at you when you get the critique to start rolling in.
But, every dev I've known wants people to care about their creations and that means taking the hate along with the love...
"Shipping involves putting a stake in the ground and saying, "here's what we have" and releasing something good enough that a group of people will love it."
I've heard it said that you never finish any creative work, you just know when it's the right time to send it out into the world.
Good summary hardeyez. I think developing a thick skin is important.
After playing Fez quite a bit I can say that Fish really released a great game. I have found a few rotating game bugs where I end up dying, but since there is no negative for dying its not a huge deal. So, yeah they did ship with a few bugs and the game is on 1.0.7 and still have a few. Again, not a huge deal, the game is beautiful.
After watching "Indie Game: The Movie," I hope Phil got enough from sales of Fez to live the rest of his life in peace. The guy seems like he could really use it. In fact, I'm considering picking up a copy even if I can't play it.
Fez is currently being ported to Mac and Linux as we speak by one of the dudes that does the Humble Bundle porting. So, you will be able to play it on your platform of choice.
My guess is that this is part of some future bundle, but we shall see :D
I decided do go ahead and play it on Windows and all I can say is WOW, the game is incredible.
That is great news. I wonder if the ports will be in Steam or standalone as has been the case with several of the Bundle titles. Either way, I'd be pleased just to play it.
I'm willing to take the chance it'll run under Wine. If it doesn't, I wait for the port or run it in Windows, which I'm going to have to install to play Saint's Row IV. Then, when it does appear in one of the Bundles, I allocate more to Child's Play.