Videogame development times are getting out of control
Videogame development times are getting out of control
Death Stranding came out in 2019. Death Stranding 2 will come out in 2025. That's six years for two games. If these were the PS2 days Kojima would have cranked out 3 Death Stranding games by now and we'd be getting Death Stranding 3: Subsistence along with a teaser for Death Stranding 4 next year.
Remember when video game trilogies used be to a huge thing in the sixth and seventh generations? You'd typically get 3 games in about 5-7 years
See: Halo, Gears of War, Resistance, Killzone, etc
uncritical support to no crunch time
Idk supergiant (I think I’ve heard they are fairly tight inside) seems fine doing one small game in three years? Instead of yearly ubisoft slop (they make them like in 2? Or did they switch to 3?)
Larian or rockstar do like one in 5 years (although rockstar sucks on working part)
(I'm also fairly tight inside)
rockstar do like one in 5 years
yeah rockstar makes games that take so much effort that they probably shouldn't exist at all, so they take a long time to make even under awful crunch conditions
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I’m kinda fine-ish with eye candy, it could be neat on a budget 5 years later, scope though grinds my gears, don’t need your square kilometers of procedurally generated forest with dick to show for it except randomly placed animals. I want to get lost in a forest I will go to a real forest. Same for half the cities, like I get how gta landed there, but as a result walking in that game feels just wasteful in time
Surely this means games are higher quality and more enjoyable now right?
higher quality
Of course! It'll use generative AI to bring us 8K graphics.
Star Citizen is on over a decade of development time and is approaching a billion dollars in rube investments.
I'm not up to date with the latest lore. What's the next "after server meshing NOW the game will be ready?" technology or are we still waiting on server meshing?
Server meshing is the "Jesus tech" that the true believers are praying for that will somehow make all the jank evaporate in a puff of euphoria.
They've started live testing server meshing and its hilarious because when it actually works you realise they didnt design any facet of the game for more than 20 players at a time. There literally arnt enough habs for people to spawn in, way to little elevators and screens. Everything is diagetic but in such limited quantities that when they did the 1000 player test (Which only got to 750 before crashing) people had to form actual queues to use the terminals to spawn ships. Unlike a lot of people I'm pretty confident they'll eventually release a proper game I just dont think it will be any fun at all. They just keep making the game more and more tedious in the name of "realism".
Take it with a grain of salt but from what I know of the industry it's mostly a management problem. Sure games are ambitious but we have so many tools at our disposal and game developers are, in fact, extremely fucking skilled. However the suits thought that the SCRUM methodology was cool and now instead of having a general direction for the project, devs have to vomit code and assets until the amount of slop is enough to look like a game
SCRUM
doesn't know what exactly SCRUM is
looks up SCRUM
I'm actually certified in a version of SCRUM. I've been on a total of one project which did it in what I would say is the correct way. Where the primary purpose was to gauge work and plan around the developers capabilities and needs, instead of having deadlines imposed arbitrarily from the top. It worked great and we delivered a useful tool in a relatively quick period with pretty inexperienced devs.
Every other time though it's a poor excuse for managers to waste time with useless metrics reporting and whip the devs into coding faster.
I am a victim of agile and we spend probably half the work hours in a week on agile shite alone. But it generates pretty graphs for the useless execs because its not about producing anything but about control.
Yeah, something is definitely wrong. It's easy to point to complexity or whatever as the problem, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was microplastics rotting the devs' brains or something.
It's not that hard to pinpoint the problem. The problem is capitalism.
I think about this a lot. So much time is wasted due to bullshit like copyright laws. Imagine if all games were open source and you could copy+paste assets, then focus on changing things to match your gameplay/artistic style/whatever. Instead, games have to be built from the ground up because no one shares their progress. Despite every game having something like trees, each game has to waste time programming trees, sculpting trees, making tree textures, and so on and so forth.
What if instead you could just download the tree file everyone has worked on, added more to it if you wanted, then re-upload the tree file for someone else to use? Now you have multiple iterations of the tree with varying levels of fidelity and no known bugs for the Generic Gaming Program.
The closest we have to this are various game engines like Source and Unreal. But even those have limitations because the companies working on them don't share with each other (it'd turn into a monopoly and made illegal). And of course this could apply to any field, from automotives to food products.
I'm sure I'm just describing Dengism or some shit but I'm too much of a lib that hasn't read enough theory to realize smarter people than I am wrote books about this decades ago and it's foundational to multiple schools of communist thought.
Didnt they drop a teaser for OD as well? Not just death stranding 2. There are so many games coming out all the time i'm always falling behind anyway, I dont think more slop faster is necessary
yeah but did they spend $200+ million per game?
Seems like dev times are either way too long or games are rushed out too early these days with almost no middle ground
Or both.
I broadly agree but I don't think that Kojimbo is the best example lol, isn't part of why he got fired from Konami that he was taking too long on MGSV?
I also think that part of the reason for longer dev times/cycles between games is that everything wants to be a GaaS, so development is continuing for a longer period after release.
When it comes to Elder Scrolls 6, idk, Todd just don't got the magic anymore.
Elder Scrolls 6 is pretty easy to explain, they simply were not working on it, focused entirely on Starfield. That teaser from years ago was a distraction to make you think they were still working on it, and to get shareholders to shut up about them not putting out the next installment.
That teaser was outright fake, they published it literally 2 days after failout 76 caused nearly a literal riot with how shit it was.
Even indie games take years and years, although it makes more sense for them. Silksong still has no release date right?
UFO 50 was announced in 2017.
I mean, if I were to start my dream game tomorrow, it would take a while since I'd also have a job. Plenty of indie games are like that
Talking more about the ones that aren't side-projects.
I’m just glad to get another Civ game this decade. I just hope it’s as good as Civ 6
Oh, another Civ 6 enjoyer! I'm actually not the biggest Civ fan (I just prefer some other 4X games), but I do enjoy the series and have been playing it since Civ 4. The thing is, these games usually need two expansions before they really feel complete to me. That was the case with Civ 4, Civ 5, and Civ 6, and I assume it will be the same with Civ 7.
On a different note, I actually really like that each modern Civ game tries something slightly different (looking at Civ 7). It always leads to some backlash, but it also cements each entry as a new spin on the series.
I'm aware Civ 6 got some pushback, especially from older fans, due to the art style (I think it's totally fine, if a bit Pixar-esque). But Civ 6 is also the biggest Civ game so far in terms of numbers and success.
So I'm almost certain they are going to cook for CIV 7 (Im of the opinion they cooked with every single CIV game ...they are just different and appeal to different people at times)
I've tried to get into other 4X's like Europa, Stellaris CK but the learning curve is pretty high admittedly! I'll give Europa another shot someday.
I actually welcome how each Civ tries to do something different, but the districts in 6 are such a huge addition that I'm a little sad they won't return in 7 in the same fashion. Nothing lights up my monkey brain like finding a +6 Campus/IZ/Harbor tile
If there's one thing I worry for 7, it's that the fanbase for 5 is very vocal online. I enjoyed 5 for what it was at its time but going back now it seems TOO simple with the streamlined culture tree and the overemphasis on building Tall. It's a 4X game, turtling at 4 cities is no fun!! The less influence the better.
I started with Civ Rev I for the PS3, I appreciate the goofy art style in 6 haha.
RGG's Yakuza games are the only good games at this point.
And they have like half the dev time because they don't make everything from scratch every time
Death stranding was announced in 2016 (probably been in dev since 2015) and released in 2019, that's 3-4 years. With the basic gameplay already done, and a lot of systems already locked down, how the fuck does Death Stranding 2 take 5-6 years to make? What are they making?
I do think they (Kojiprod) didn't even consider a sequel until after COVID. If I remember well, in some interviews Kojima mentioned that the first game would have been completely different if the lockdown had happened during development time, and it is implied that DS2 is a direct response to it.
Now here's the thing, even with that information in mind (let's say Kojima starts writing in 2021, and preprod follows), they should still not take as long, because the core systems are already there, so I'm not sure what's taking so long. My guess would be scanning/filming for cutscenes, because at this point it's going to be more of a movie than a game
That's a good point, I imagine the new environments take some time to build too.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Are getting? I feel like we've already been at that point for a while now
Edit: Plus, games are getting too long and bloated. 100+ hours is a lot for a single playthrough
good games take time to develop and there are already way too many games
Bad games take time now as well. The problem is most of the work isn't being spent on things that make the game fun. It's graphical shit and debugging said graphical shit.
Maybe an unpopular opinion but:
I like games with good mechanics and satisfying loops. I take a Teardown over Horizon Zero Dawn any time. Both games are great, but one focused it's resources on one thing they really owned, the other is a playable movie.
A GTA clone with simulated reactions of the environment, based on player actions would be as fun as the designed stuff. Even if it's wonky it feels more real.
Imagine Rockstar would do Dwarf-Fortress. They could never reach this depth with their team of 1000 in 10 years because they would do the mechanics "manually". Look at GTA5 and how sterile the world feels while it looks amazing. Shooting down a Plane? No reaction at all. Give me Minecraft graphics and simulate the emergency/social/media/physical response for such an disaster based on existing game rules. That would be fun. (And is the secret of Indie games like Rainworld, DF, Teardown, CDDA, Minecraft, Project Zomboid, .... and the new Zelda Games or Space-Engineers).
I would even like to see how a game like "Facade" would turn out today with the support of LLM for the dialogue.
Or: Remember Serious Sam? 100ds of enemies at once? Why are there no games with Serious Sam 2 graphics and 1000nds of Enemies? Why does everything have to be that "polished".
"Emerging Complexity" is one of the new buzzwords in game design, so hopefully you get your wish sooner or later.
UFO 50 was originally announced in 2017 and it released just a while ago. You should play that game, it owns.
FF7 Rebirth PC when?
I think a lot of it isn't due to developers as much as it is bonehead executive speculation plays. There also wasn't chasing the live service dragon.
How many Yakuzas have we had? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakuza_(franchise)
Someones doing something right over there.
meanwhile rockstar and bethesda be like
Oh no, looks like you'll have nothing to play, because the only games that are ever available to play are ones released in the past 5 years. There definitely is not a cumulative total of games that is more than you could ever imagine playing in 5 whole lifetimes, no sir. You're literally going to have to stare at a wall for 12 months straight while you wait for Death Stranding 2. Consider it practice/mental toning for the actual game.
I haven't even played the first game
And it's not even chief evil for gigacorp games, if anything, corpos tend to have better, though still sucking development times, but new norm is sitting on popular franchises doing nothing for years and decades. Indies and small companies got real fucking problems with dev hells. I follow games that are in development for a literal decade, they aren't fake since some progress is done, but release is nowhere close. Or the ones which are in development for years and when they release it's still early access with years more, and this can't be even explained by lack of manpower, those games aren't substantially different in scope of those from 20 years ago.
