Was JAW the worst thing to happen to Oddworld?
 

I stumbled upon the following YouTube comment in reference to New 'N' Tasty:

Anything Just Add Water makes seriously needs to be avoided. JAW botched The Oddbox when it released, they botched Stranger's Wrath on the PC twice (and from a quick glance over the Steam forums, the game is STILL unplayable) and apparently they didn't do a great job with this game either. JAW is the worst thing to happen to the Oddworld franchise, and I really wish people would stop supporting them. They're a self-congratulatory, half-assing studio.

I've never looked into JAW before so I wasn't fully aware of how poorly they handled the Oddworld ports. If they have damaged the Oddworld brand and reputation then no wonder OWI got rid of them. What's your take on JAW's contribution to Oddworld, and New 'N' Tasty in general?

I noticed that NNT had some amateur design flaws, such as environmental hazards being tied to framerate, and some of the Slig timings were off in "Hard" mode which made one Elum jump section an utter crapshoot.

Lorne signed off on everything JAW released. You can't just say they're to blame for tonnes of shit.

Also, I'm not sure that JAW did the Stranger PC port. I thought they only worked on the console versions.

Also...

Xbox launch title, man... Xbox launch title.

What a bizarre thread.

Considering that JAW, to my understanding, was the reason Oddworld Inhabitants even came back; no, it was NOT the worst thing to happen to Oddworld. That would be EA Games, with Microsoft and/or Atari at a close second.

As far as I'm aware, they did. However, they didn't make any of the two Munch's Oddysee PC ports.

Just stating the fact, not necessarily sharing the same opinion.

I think JAW did a great job in New 'n' Tasty. I know the game had it bugs - I think their testing team could've been better like - the DDG from Abe's Oddysee is there and also it's more broken than Abe's Oddysee as you can teleport to a different location on the map!

EA fucking over OWI with MO was the worst thing to happen to them in my opinion. i was so looking forward to that game. they had so much planned for it and i still believe it would have blown then-current games out of the water in terms of world-building and evolution of environments/characters etc. for example i'm pretty sure they were going to include seasons, unless i'm getting mixed up with Hand of Odd, but obviously that never happened. and i think the gameplay was going to be more open-world too, less on-the-rails than it turned out to be.

i understand there's always big ideas for games and usually you end up with a more watered-down version of what was originally envisioned due to time constraints, hardware limitations and obviously money, but EA really did fuck over OWI with MO. if i remember right OWI had to pretty much start again from scratch when they joined up with EA, so with even less time to get it finished than they had before we only got half a game. and to me, as someone who was looking forward to all the crazy 'advanced' (at the time) shit it was going to include, it really did show. i could tell it wasn't what was originally planned. the game felt empty to me.

as for the SW pc port being 'unplayable', i've actually started playing that game again recently and i've had no issues so far. i know about the giant sleg issue (lol) and i know there's one problem that can occur where suddenly you can't move stranger any more, but that's fixed by enabling V-sync or something from the main menu. or maybe disabling it, i'm not sure can't remember.

long story short EA can fuck off

EA had nothing to do with Munch's Oddysee.

They were the ones that forced MO to be rushed through u soppy bollock.

what?

EA were the ones that pressed for OG 2001 MO to be rushed through, which is the reason it was the way it was, right?

I'm not sure where you're getting that from.

Oh wait it was Stranger's Wrath that EA caused to flop (financially) wasn't it? I haven't had enough of my afternoon coffee, Alex.

oh shit right okay, i must have gotten SW mixed up with MO. all this time i just assumed it was EA.

either way whoever it was they didn't exactly help OWI.

I bet it was fucking GT Interactive, the bastards.

Nope, it was Microsoft. They forced Munch's Oddysee to have their tone be cartoony and light-hearted to appeal to the Super Mario Bros. crowd, and made the game a launch title (which resulted in the rushed production).

Not really a surprise considering their corporate greed (killing off their free art/movie programs, forcing a paid subscription for Word, forcing Valve to charge for Left 4 Dead 2 maps that were supposed to be free, charging for playing online and resulting in their competitors also cheating their customers, etc.).

GT was bought out by Infograme (now Atari, SA;and was the same company responsible for the Driv3r scam), and probably would have slashed Oddworld's over $3,000,000 budgets.

Really bad circumstances during that time.

we got it wrong, man. going by memory has it's drawbacks. must be getting old. at least we have Oddjob to use as a canary-in-the-mine, when he starts going senile we know we should top ourselves.

UNTIL THEN i shall continue to spread disinformation

so it was Microcock. i shoulda known

I agree with Alex.

Best thread.

Who's Oddjob? Regardless, it's an outrage how badly LucasArts fucked up Munch.

I think JAW did an ok job with the stuff they made. The biggest problems I ever had with Stranger was some achievements that don't work properly to this day.

I'm not entirely sure who made the original Munch PC port. If that was JAW then yeah, pretty terrible fucking job there. Square One Games actually made Munch playable on PC and it's pretty good now.

My biggest gripe with JAW was mostly that Stewart seemed to be a sourpuss most of the time with no sense of humor what so ever. I think he visited these forums a few times and was promptly insulted by everything he read, even if some of it was fair criticism.

The other thing is something I've voiced already, but JAW was very PlayStation focused. It was pretty much the only platform they had any experience with and overall they seemed extremely reluctant to let go of that. At one point we had a situation where Lorne Lanning was preaching his platform agnostic standpoint while JAW was giving under the table handjobs to Sony all day long. Every piece of promo art, every video, every media presentation before the release was all PlayStation sponsored. New n Tasty even had an E3 slot in Sony's presentation as an indie. Then during that same presentation, New 'n' Tasty was announced to be a 1 month exclusive for the PS4. And even that eventually turned into 7 months because, lo and behold, barely any work was done on ports for other systems because everything was being focused on the PlayStation release. And since Lorne is always going on about being independent and platform agnostic, I find it very hard to believe this massive push for PlayStation came from him initially. I find it much more likely that that was Stewart's influence and their inexperience with other systems kind of forced Lorne to accept the situation.

So yeah, JAW was far from the worst thing to happen to Oddworld, but you can bet that there was more to their ending partnership than just 'distance and timezones'. There was a fundamental disagreement about something, somewhere, between Stewart and Lorne. One day we'll probably hear that story in full.

Why the hell does this thread exists
I second this

My jaw hurts from reading this

For the record, JAW ruined the GBA version of Munch's Oddysee for me, it's just shameful.

Are we all just gonna gloss over their involvement in the video game crash of 1983?

Can't wait for Meech's next thread.

The important thing is we’re talking.

Interesting, Havoc - thanks for going indepth.

Oh, yeah. Stew was a bit of a plonker. When Oddboxx first released in 2010 it was piss poor, prompting a megathread on another forum filled with complaints and people calling out JAW for rushing the port. Stewart showed up trying to explain himself, revealed that he was very out of touch with modern PC gaming (and therefore probably shouldn't be in charge of a PC port) and was given a bollocking by some very angry people who felt conned out of their money. He deserved that public steamrolling, as the Oddworld IP should've been treated with more respect.

JAW had no experience porting console games to PC but they blagged OWI for the contract anyway. As a result Oddworld fans were left out of pocket with ports that barely worked on release. However, NNT is pretty solid and graphically it does look great, which shows they have some talented people working for them especially on the design side of things, and the games have since been patched. I'll give them that, in the interest of fairness.

Has anyone come public with what happened between JAW and OWI? Also is Wil still working with one of them? I've been out of this for a while.