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Long Dev Time Equals Better Game?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the not-always dept.

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."

4 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I have one name: by El_Muerte_TDS · · Score: 4, Informative

    Daikatana didn't have a long development time, longer than initially planned, but not long with respect to other games.

  2. More data points by tepples · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:one word by masklinn · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  4. Re:Computer Projects by masklinn · · Score: 2, Informative
    Source of that comment is Joel's Hitting the High Note article, data comes from Professor Stanley Eisenstat at Yale, who teaches CS 323.

    Scroll to the middle of the page for that part, you can see the chart here, Joel's comment being

    There's just nothing to see here, and that's the point. The quality of the work and the amount of time spent are simply uncorrelated.
    --
    "The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler