This town is full of monsters!. How Konami buried two dev teams in Silent Hill
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The beginning of 2012 brings a revival in the Tokyo offices. Konami's initial plan backfired, but a new date is set and in March, Silent Hill is set to launch its triple assault on the hearts and wallets of devoted fans and all those who like horror and macabre. The problem was that these additional months of work were still not enough for the studios involved in the three projects to make satisfactory progress.The HD collection, Downpour and Book of Memories still required polishing, tweaking and many weeks of painstaking work to reach a level close to that brought by the original releases.
However, Konami's bosses no longer intend to burn money in projects that have long exceeded the assumed deadlines. The Hijinx Studios and Vatra Games teams have to face a dilemma without a good way out. The games must hit the shelves in March in any condition, or the projects would be discontinued. It is easy to guess which direction the involved parties took. Surprisingly, a similar headache was avoided by the WayForward Technologies team, whose companies decide to postpone the premiere of the spin-off on PS Vita by additional several months. As Tomm Hulett later explained in an interview with Siliconera:
In case of Book of Memories, we tried to fit the release in the same month as Silent Hill: Downpour and Silent Hill HD Collection. At that time, the game wasn't fully finished yet, so we thought we'd take the extra time to fine-tune it and then wait for the movie to come out to make players feel like they had not only the movie, but a new game as well.
At this point, Konami seemed like it was trying to save a house of cards. Desperate attempts to support the structure simply could not be successful. Subsequent negligence and poor decisions of the publisher accumulated, culminating in the March madness accompanying both releases.
Buggy and underdeveloped Silent Hill HD Collection and Downpour appeared just one week apart. Accompanied by an extremely poor marketing campaign, characterized by the lack of trailers in virtual PlayStation and Xbox stores. The brand crashed into some really strong competition: Mass Effect 3, Journey, Ninja Gaiden 3 and even Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City, which effectively weakens the interest in the month of madness. Reviews of both productions and fast-spreading news about their poor technical condition further exacerbate the problems. Here's a good excerpt from Downpour review offering a summary:
Silent Hill: Downpour is a game full of contradictions. A good plot, fantastic visions of the hero and interesting puzzles are quite captivating. On the other hand, there are poor graphics, no gradation of tension, broken combat mechanics. Konami has lost its instincts in this generation of consoles and the so-called 'big versions' of games from this series do not withstand comparisons with some games with smaller requirements, or even mobile productions. Probably the most honest way to look at the production of Vatra Games is as a mediocre game with some potential.
In both cases, the main concern was the dubious technical quality: annoying bugs, texture problems or, in the case of Downpour , problems with auto-save system. Players could not believe how the remasters of the classics performed much worse on more powerful equipment than they did on the good old PlayStation 2. The new release is mostly characterized by a vibe of disappointment, multiplied by unfulfilled promises, which were explicitly made prior to the launch day.
Against such backdrop, the subsequent premiere of Silent Hill: Book of Memories wasn't that bad, although many fans of the series were disappointed it was such a different game, abandoning the old formula in favor of a dungeon-crawler-y mechanics. However, WayForward Technologies had enough time to ensure a more solid delivery, which, as a result, reaped scores that were above average, and achieved a good financial result for a PS Vita game.
