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Long Dev Time Equals Better Game?
Via a GameSetWatch post, a piece on Treyarch Producer Stuart Roch's blog. He discusses the long development time of Shadow of the Colossus, and what four years of work did for that title. From the article: "Granted, it's a bit of a stretch to make a simple correlation between more development time and higher quality product based on this tiny product sample, but I have to admit, there is certain attractiveness to the argument. Can it be that in a given number of development cycles, those that had more time with less resources would create better games than those that had short dev cycles with monster teams? One might think that having more time would allow for more polish and iteration and therefore yield higher quality product, but as I'm sure you're thinking, examples can be made of both good and bad games that were in production for long periods of time."
Duke Nukem Forever will be uber sweet.
So Duke Nukem Forever will be a god like game
THE WORLD IS GOING TO END!!!! eventually.
Shenmue I/II took 7 years, after all.
Daikatana
IMarv
Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
There are so many things to disprove this (Daikana). Numerous games that waddled through development hell to end up terrible or medioctre.
God Bless America. Why? Did it sneeze?
Blizzard games are not rushed. They turn out excellent because they are not rushed.
One of the developers of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker disclosed that collecting the pieces of the Triforce was rushed, and that turned out to be the most annoying part of the game among critics.
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Of course that doesn't make sense to the publisher, but it really would be the way to get the best games as an end result. You would (or maybe wouldn't) be surprised at how much stuff has been cut out of the games that I've worked on, ALWAYS due to lack of time.
Trying to crunch the development cycle pretty much always just perpetuates this lack of time, no matter how many people you have on the project. When people start going fast they make mistakes. Sometimes they make structural mistakes, or don't think systems out enough before they start implementing. This stuff really bites you further down the line. And forget about having time to go back and clean up existing systems, that oppertunity is very very rare.
Of course these things aren't really game specific, I'm sure people in other lines of work have seen similar trends.
I think you will find a negative correlation. Longer dev cycles (especially 4 years!) is usually indicative of a poorly planned project. I doubt very much they planned this game taking 4 years before release. A lot of the time delayed games will be using older technology as well (although this doesn't necessarily make for a bad game).
Sometimes you strain and strain and strain for what feels like hours and are sorely dissapointed by the piffly splash.
Othertimes without even trying your bowels fall out and you almost get swept away by the tidal wave wake it causes.
Don't rush development and for gods sake, flush afterwards.
I have code that I've been holding off developing for a while now - the ideas are still fresh and there isn't any market competition, however I just don't feel relaxed enough to code it yet. The time will come, I'm not going to rush it.
liqbase
Developers should take thier time to make thier games. However that's not going to guarantee us a great product.
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In a hits driven market where about 4% of the games accounts for over 55% of all sales, there is no correlation between longer development time and market success. A longer development leads to higher engineering quality (e.g. more iterations for testing etc). But still that does not guarantee a hit title. I think there is an upper limit on the development time at a certain time technology catches up and your fancy 3d engine is already outdated before your game hits the shelves. Reworking at that stage is very expensive, leading to high costs etc etc.
...what matters is what you like, not what you are like...
This means all my hard work these past 20 years on my pet project, "E.T. II" for the Atari 2600, have not been in vain!!!
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You're goddamn right in the sad sense that there's no correlation between sales and playablity of a game. All you say is true: developers may spend years polishing a game and making it really great, and it still will be a marketing flop. The few players that will buy it, will love it, but the rest won't even know it existed. Generally time spent on a game correlates (not always but usually) with the quality of the game (in terms of good gameplay, less bugs, better art and all such), but unfortunately it doesn't correlate with sales, and drives the cost higher. So we have more rushed, sucky games on the market.
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I suspect it's the same with video games- one person with a great idea and good programming skill could program the next "Geometry Wars" in a couple months, while some shovelware games have taken huge groups of people years. (Daikatana is the first that pops into everyone's head, but there have been others). Don't judge a game by how much time has been spent on it- it's like saying a movie will be good because it had a high budget.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Whether it's a team of 5 developers or 500, if there isn't someone paying attention to the overall picture and architecture of a software product, be it a game or CMS, it's going to take longer.
I've worked on teams of 10 or less where everything was disorganized and took forever to complete, regardless of additional resources, and ones where there was a Tech Lead making sure everything was on track enabling us to produce far more than we had promised under schedule.
I've also worked in a big company on larger teams and the same logic holds true. An incompetent manager meant lots of programmers stepping on each others toes and producing conflicting code. A competent manager meant lots of parallel and complementary development.
Disclaimer: Of course, I'm generalizing based upon my anecdotal experience and leaving out a ton of external factors that affect development, (funding, policy, overriding and sometimes harmful decisions of executive management), so this is just my overall impression based upon my limited work experience that did NOT involve game development.
- tokengeekgrrl
I guess the money men like to have some concrete metrics they can hang their hats on, but the hard truth is just that CREATIVE TEAMS make great games. Without a good vision and good creative people behind it, no amount of time will make the game great.
People keep using Daikatana as an example. Since I've been living in a cave for the past 10 years, please let me know. Which side of the argument are you siding with? Did Daikatana suck, or quite the opposite?
EVE Online apparently went through 11 development cycles, with several complete re-codes, over a period of a few years. Their graphics / MMO engine was so ambitious at the time that the developers couldn't do it one big go, so they did it in numerous steps. For them, it paid off.
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http://myeve.eve-online.com/download/videos/?type
http://myeve.eve-online.com/download/videos/Defau
Duke Nukem, in its development, has become so amazing that it can't be released lest it spawn a new religion or flat out kill people because their brains cannot handle the incredibleness of the game.
Longer time could also mean out of date Game/Engine
Long development time doesn't have anything to do with quality at all, beyond a reasonable time to get the game together, that is. Actually, such games can fall into the Daikatana and Duke Nukem Forever trap and forever have to catch up with the technology they keep falling behind, and expectations impossible to meet from the long time it has been in development.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Is that whatever technology you settle on may be obviously inferior by the time you release. Imagine starting a game on dx9 now that takes four years to complete. By then the world has dx11 and you have obviously dated graphics.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I generally prefer smaller teams with more time, but just creating that situation is not necissarily even a win. If anything, I'd say the amount of focus a project has is most closely tied to it's potential success; and focus is naturally diluted as you add people and time (usually more by adding people than by adding time). As a counter example, we just shipped Guitar Hero. Start to finish in 9 months, including designing our own hardware controller. It's as highly regarded as SOTC or GOW is, yet was built in a fraction of the time with a much smaller crew. Focus was key for us; we knew exactly what we were building, and every member of the team knew exactly what the vibe had to be. We knew the project had to rock, and if there's one thing you can say about GH, it's that it rocks.
Also, many felt that KOTOR2 was so rushed that the storyline suffered as a result. In fact, a petition was raised surrounding that very point.
I have to agree, longer dev times can only help a game's success. I personally would rather have a functional game with cool features and better story than an early release for a poorer product.
Prove it.
95% of the gaming population swears that it sucks, 5% didn't answer the question.
100% of those numbers were pulled out of my ass a few seconds ago.
(seriously, it sucks, badly, it was the worst FPS of that time, and it basically ended Romero's career as a PC dev, and more or less shut Ion Storm).
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
The difference between Daikatana and SotC is this:
SotC was made pretty much by a single team, and they pretty much had a cohesive vision of what should go into the game. It may have taken them a long time to find out what that vision was, but the team, being small for game team standards, managed to pull it all together in the end through communication and a common goal of making a great game.
Romero... how many teams did he go through to produce Daicrapola? 3? Didn't he bring in a bunch of game mod kiddies off the street for that game? And then there's the whole issue of some people being on there strictly for decoration's sake (*cough*"Killcreek"*cough*). Not exactly a great way to alchemize a team devoted to outputting a cohesive product of high quality.
In these two extreme cases we see two entirely *different* kinds of long development cycles, so that using the one to attempt to refute the validity of the other becomes an apples-and-oranges comparison.
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...but at least one game I followed very closely, which ran way overdue on development and pretty much flopped suffered from one thing: Making the components hit time-to-market at the same time. It was almost ready to go (called it version 0.95), wouldn't have done great but would have been ok. Then some investor money came in and the scope was changed.
First up was a graphics overhaul (it needed it). But that again lead to some new opportunities in gameplay, which lead to new game features, which lead to new AI/game balancing work. Then you needed some new sounds, some new textures and effects and well... to put a long story short, they never seemed to manage to synch it up again, it always came across as having really bad flaws (for the market they were now aiming for).
I think that's the #1 priority - it's like getting all the food done at the same time for a meal. Some things you can just keep warm, others spoil quickly. When your 80% there it's not the time to figure out "Hey this sauce I bought isn't that great, I'll just put everything on hold and whip up my own." By the time you're done the steak is dry and the potatoes cooked to bits.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Duke Nukem Forever has been announced to be the pack-in game for Infinium Labs' Phantom gaming console system.
I'm not sure if the dukenukem tag on the article should be modded "funny" or "flamebait" :)
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"examples can be made of both good and bad games that were in production for long periods of time"
Doesn't that tell you something... perhaps there are other factors at play here.
Additionally, there isn't much benefit to using a term like "longer" in the question without providing a "than" to go along with it. longer than what? "longer than a very short time and shorter than a very long time" would be an appropriate answer to a poor question.
I give you a previous slashdot article about meteos, easily the greatest puzzle game ive ever played. Not the longest development time, apparently.
My hand touched her hand. Her hand touched her boob. By the transitive property, I got some boob! Algebra is awesome!
Must then join the ranks of DNF, for the uber sweetness that it will be.
after over 10 years at big and small dev & publishing houses alike, hits and misses, taking a long time on a game is due more than anything to lack of professionalism, lack of a coherent vision, & lack of understanding of the game and the game's players.
Good games shouldn't take a long time. That isn't to say there is one way to make a game, but "taking a long time" is the suckers route, not to mention the most expensive (and in part why many game dev houses fail after a year or two).
To avoid this, try getting a good designer, one who doesn't just do what they think is "cool" but actually knows how to build in the player's experience. And don't hire people full time if you don't need them full time. Lastly, look into the many reasons "collaboration" exists on each film projects; why film production companies (often a group of friends) are created for 1 project and why that's enough.
Derek Smart had been working on that game since 1992, and look what that got him.
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So has everyone forgotten Battlecruiser 3000 AD? That was in development for 10 years and was still a bug ridden, nearly unplayable, overly complex pile of crap when it was released. And the asshat behind it, Derek Smart, is still apparently making enough money to conintue making yet more piles of crap.
DNF doesn't deserve the abuse that it gets. I hasn't even been released yet. Has 3D Realms ever produced a BAD game? Since Rise of the Triad, it's all been good, no matter how long it takes them to release it.
Psychonauts: 4 years in development, great game.
Malice was to be an xbox launch title, but only came out about 8 months ago, not a really bad game just not all that great.
Seems that the 'talent' were not working on it all that time, the original trailers would have made it a must buy for me.
But the question is should it have been completely killed off instead of taking the long way around that it did ?
Has anyone got any good links detailing what went wrong ?
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...you insensitive clod!
Longer dev cycles = Better games.
It's not a hard fast rule.
It doesn't mean you can't make a great game in 6 months.
And it doesn't mean the FPS you spent 6 years in the making is going to be anywhere near good.
It simply means if developers had more time, more money, and less pressure from publishers that they could create a superior product.
Guitar Hero was a good game, but it was far from the technological landmark that SotC was for the PS2.
GH had buggy animations, terrible multiplayer options, laughable training/tutorial modes, and a poor selection of songs.
Don't tell me that with twice the budget and half a year more of development that Harmonix would not be able to produce an even more incredible game.
Yet Guitar Hero is still a great game for its design and creativeness.
However, there is no shot in hell that the developers Harmonix will be asking for a smaller budget or shorter dev cycle for the second time around.
Why? Since you claim they can obviously make great games in short dev cycles.
Do you also believe they could take the same amount of money and time they spent on GH and turn it into a game in the same genre as SotC that would be anywhere near the level of SotC?
Give me a break.
Longer dev cycles = Better games.
Ask 100 developers of 100 games if they could improve/polish their game with an extra 3 paid months and 90 of them would say okay.
Come back in 3 months time and you'd have 80 games that were better off than they were 3 months ago.
Geez, Martha! I just don't know how it happened?! IT'S LIKE MAGIC!
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