Its not often in the gaming industry that you’ll find a studio readily admitting that the score awarded to them was deserved. A few sites gave Gears of War 3 scores ranging in the low eighties, and the staff behind were mysteriously murdered with some sort of chainsaw weapon while Cliffy B went around asking for a recipe to remove blood stains.
Likewise with Peter Molyneux, every time he gets accused of delivering a game that is underwhelming and doesn’t live up to the promises that he made, he sticks his fingers in his ears and shouts strange noises to block out the criticism.
Relic however, have been pretty forthcoming about the critical reception they’ve received about their first real action game, Warhammer 40K: Space Marine, admitting that they actually deserved any score that was awarded to them.
Space Marine producer Andy Lang told Eurogamer that Relic were perfectly fine with scores ranging from 75 to 80, and that they were probably deserved due to several shortcomings in the game.
“Was it our best work?”, Lang asked. “It was our best console work. I’m pretty humble, I don’t look at (criticism) and get all upset. I thought most of the reviews were fairly on the mark with what they had to say; the character design does get a bit repetitive and certain parts of it, just how the game plays, we didn’t have time to really polish that stuff to where we wanted to get to. There wasn’t anything that was oh-my-god shocking in the game.”
“We’re not super surprised by (the scores). Of course we’d always like to have higher scores, but with our feature-set and coming out late in the console cycle, it’s really hard to have that feature-rich game. We did our best to deliver that blockbuster experience. And the scores landed where they landed.”
“It was a new experience for many of us on the team”, Lang explained. “But we did bring in a lot of new talent that have worked on these games before to flesh it out. And Relic’s pedigree of pushing for quality that we’ve done in RTS titles, we really tried to bring that level of polish to a third-person game”.
“With regards to the strategy genre, we’re on our fifth, sixth iterations; with this genre we’re just starting out.”
It’s refreshing to see a studio admit for once that they could do better, instead of bemoaning any criticism that they receive. Relic is already talking about a Space Marine sequel, and while there is definite room for improvement, lets hope they keep certain design elements intact, as nothing was more fun than using a jet-pack to rain down justice in the form of a power-hammer in that particular game.
Last Updated: October 13, 2011
