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."

Comments

Re:Solid work

[fishybell]

Having worked on several long-term projects-done-by-small-teams in the past, I can say that my experience differs greatly.

Usually if something is taking a long time, it's not because you haven't polished it enough, or because it's not perfect yet, but rather because it's too broken to sell in its current state. Usually a 3-5 month initial devel, followed by a month or so of in house testing, followed by 3 fscking years of beta tests leads to a very polished terd with lots of useless doodads added on.

Yes, there are examples of projects that have taken a long time, and been good at the end, but you can not correlate the long dev time to the quality in way. The only thing the long time speaks for is that the developers couldn't get everything done in a smaller amount of time. "Everything" of course refers not just to features but also the features working correctly.

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[Lally Singh]

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