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

EVE Online...

[code-e255]

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.

http://myeve.eve-online.com/download/videos/?type= 3
http://myeve.eve-online.com/download/videos/Defaul t.asp?a=download&vid=41

Re:Three Words:

[russellh]

Mythical Man Month

Back in the day, I used to use games as examples of great software. We were doing banking software for enormous financial institutions. We got the Big Book of Requirements and we did our best to make it happen. Not exactly an environment where you can get passionate about the results. So much software is built by people who don't really care, have no real connection (emotional or otherwise) with the final result, and don't feel like they have any way to fix real problems - like usability or bad design. The beast is huge. I always thought that games might be the one place where people really truly cared. I'd played a lot of games since the early 80s, and rarely can I remember an instance of those games crashing, for instance. Games can be better or worse, but they all seemed to have a level of quality that I assumed derived from the passion of the creators due to the unique situation of game creators as user-developers. This, of course, has changed as games became truly Big Business.

But the answer isn't found in Brooks. It's purely Christopher Alexander - when things are built by their inhabitants, they can achieve a wholeness that does not exist in any other way of creating.

Everything else results in the big book of requirements and people that don't care. To the extent that big business drives games in that direction, they will suck, no matter their development time or team structure.

the primary risk of a long dev period

[Surt]

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.