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Thursday, March 28, 2024
I think dev time past ~5 years indicates major start/stops or restarts/rewrites in the development process
and yes, I do think quality tends to decrease if something has been in development for forever
short of those absurd passion projects like Stardew, where it's 1 guy working on it in their free time
Huge AAA games with 10 studios and 3,000 employees take longer than 5 years
tiny indie games take shorter
no idea Dialga
I don't know the development story
It was made by 2 guys it looks like though
smaller teams games are harder to judge, but yeah I would have guessed ~3 years
I'm glad it didn't have an Owlboy-tier development though
I feel like we don't disagree Dialga, or if we do it's some some semantic point of the exact point in time where the death cross is
Do you think development hell is a thing?
I think most projects (especially those with a normal-sized development team) fit into a pretty standard design rhythm was my only point
Delays happen for any number of strange one-off reasons, but most of the time you don't enter a period of "who the fuck knows" unless something has gone extremely wrong and the project has been scrapped/restarted or majorly reworked
which is usually a sign that the game they designed wasn't fun to play
sometimes they power though, and release it in a mixed state anyway (like Starfield)
sometimes they start over and remake it (like what I assume happened to Silksong)
sometimes the devs give up and spend their remaining days cooming on Twitter (like Va11HallA)
sometimes the game gets canceled, and remade into something else (like Overwatch)
Their development interviews are interesting
Todds line about "finding the fun" and not figuring out what the core loop of the game was going to be until close to release
just makes Bethesda seem like a terribly run studio
You mean Unity?
yeah
Project Titan became Overwatch
they had a game that didn't pan out, was in dev hell, and canceled it
putting Overwatch together was a move to reuse what they could from it
I'd be surprised if they moved engines, but yeah that would take a while
it would probably be more economically sound to just eat the cost of the fees
I don't think any amount of extra time would have improved NMS on-release
they essentially remade the game post-release
1.1 and 1.2 were on the release build of the game
but they worked on a complete remake in the background that they replaced the OG game with in the 2nd big update
took ~3 years iirc
And the NMS turnaround is one of the two examples I can think of where that strategy paid off
FFXIV being the other
both huge successful examples, but the extreme outliers
of games that were able to come back from a terrible launch
