games

there are plenty of exceptions to that

Huge AAA games with 10 studios and 3,000 employees take longer than 5 years

tiny indie games take shorter

how long was crosscode in development, spooky

this game is doomed

no idea Dialga

I don't know the development story

It was made by 2 guys it looks like though

the demo was put on newgrounds in early 2015, so it was in dev longer than that

it released lates 2018

i guess there's the recent success of Unicorn Overlord with its 10 year dev time

so 4 maybe 5 years

not as long as i thought it was

but its longer than your expectation

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

So a lot of devs and a lot of time is where you have a recipe for disaster

i know opinion on BOTW isnt consistent in this server but that was what, 6-7 years? which i think is standard for a zelda iirc.

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

i dont think theres a dev time limit at all, though spooky

Do you think development hell is a thing?

i wont say theres no correlation but i dont think its a big factor

Was botw done when originally planned for the wii u

it was meant to be a wii u game yes

Yeah but was it ready to be released or were they forced to delay it and just decided to release it with the switch

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

if they delayed it to put it on switch it couldnt have been more than half a year

and in that time they probably did some polish work

I think then botw would be at 2 years of strict development time, 4 if you're gonna be really generous

but its known BOTW was in development for 6 or 7 years gent

Dialga, they had the idea immediately after skyward sword, but they obviously were releasing other zelda games in the mean time

there's more than one team

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)

bethesda is consistent in how bad they release things

Their development interviews are interesting

starfield was especially always going to be a failure because they refuse to change their development tools

the longer they dont change, the worse it gets

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

about sale fees

You mean Unity?

yeah that

yeah

silksong was being devved on unity

so maybe they chose to go to a different engine

Starfield was going to be a failure because all their talent left years ago

idk about the vallhalla devs but overwatch... well its blizzard

Feel like the unity thing is more of a convenient excuse for them

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'm just saying what might have happened, its not like we can know whats happening in development unless its said

its a possibility

I'd be surprised if they moved engines, but yeah that would take a while

as for big corps and publishers, the issue is that publishers are impatient

it would probably be more economically sound to just eat the cost of the fees

they will not wait for issues to be ironed out

or even help iron them out

remember no mans sky

obviously the game needed a delay but sony wasnt gonna give them that time

the game is better now after years of extra dev time

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

We should do that but for america

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

can you really call nms a remake?

they rebuilt the game from scratch

so yes

that's how they got MP to work

i dont remember hearing about that

i just heard they kept updating it

https://www.nomanssky.com/release-log/ I am not a NMS player, so I'm probably getting the exact timeline wrong

but NMS:NEXT was released 2 years after release, and was a full rebuilt version of the game