Lair is very disappointing
I put this in the category of “Games I was really looking forward to that totally disappointed me”. I really tried hard to like this game, but it let me down big time. The game controls absolutely suck. It’s a beautiful game with a great concept, and I really do feel bad for the developers that spent years of their life developing it, but at some level of management, the team was let down by some really bad game design decisions.
I’ve heard the Lair developers defending their six axis control scheme as being for the casual gamer, but I just think there was a bit of groupthink that prevented the team from taking an objective look at the controls. As a longtime software developer, I’ve seen similiar things like this happen. To a much smaller extent, design decisions like this get raised all the time, and people become passionate about the subject. At some point, the issue gets escalated and at some level, managment wrestles with it and a direction is selected. It’s at that point, that things can go off the rail.
An old motto that is common in development is “Disagree and Commit” and for the most part, it works out well. When your life is so focused on a single project, it’s easy to get myopic and escalate issues needlessly to the point where people become passionate of the color of a font or the name of a button. In that case, there is no ‘right’ answer and making a decision and moving on makes perfect sense. For the detractors of a decision, it may not make the best sense, but it keeps the project moving and at the end of the day, it may be sub-optimal but still good enough.
The problem with “Disagree and Commit” comes after that point when new information becomes available that may reverse the decision. No one wants to re-visit a sensitive topic and managers are usually wise to avoid it. Once committed, decisions like that are hard to reverse. It’s much easier to ignore the information than to open up a sore wound, and it takes a strong manager to reverse course. I have no idea if this happened in Lair but having seen previews that commented on the faulty control scheme, I wouldn’t be surprised that something like this happened. It seems inconceivable that no one ever raised the alarm that the controls sucked or that the team didn’t read any of the previews raised around this issue.
Some people like seeing games getting reviewed poorly, but having been around the software industry so long, I really feel bad for the team that developed the product. It takes a long time and energy to develop software and it’s clear from the product that people worked passionately on this product. I would much prefer to see Lair be fantastic and lauded, but sometimes decisions have an enormous impact, and whoever made the call on the controls, let the team down.