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doublepepperoni [none/use name] @hexbear.net

Videogame development times are getting out of control

Death Stranding came out in 2019. Death Stranding 2 will come out in 2025. That's six years for two games. If these were the PS2 days Kojima would have cranked out 3 Death Stranding games by now and we'd be getting Death Stranding 3: Subsistence along with a teaser for Death Stranding 4 next year.

Remember when video game trilogies used be to a huge thing in the sixth and seventh generations? You'd typically get 3 games in about 5-7 years

See: Halo, Gears of War, Resistance, Killzone, etc

73 comments

  • Take it with a grain of salt but from what I know of the industry it's mostly a management problem. Sure games are ambitious but we have so many tools at our disposal and game developers are, in fact, extremely fucking skilled. However the suits thought that the SCRUM methodology was cool and now instead of having a general direction for the project, devs have to vomit code and assets until the amount of slop is enough to look like a game

    • I am a victim of agile and we spend probably half the work hours in a week on agile shite alone. But it generates pretty graphs for the useless execs because its not about producing anything but about control.

  • Yeah, something is definitely wrong. It's easy to point to complexity or whatever as the problem, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was microplastics rotting the devs' brains or something.

    • It's not that hard to pinpoint the problem. The problem is capitalism.

      • I think about this a lot. So much time is wasted due to bullshit like copyright laws. Imagine if all games were open source and you could copy+paste assets, then focus on changing things to match your gameplay/artistic style/whatever. Instead, games have to be built from the ground up because no one shares their progress. Despite every game having something like trees, each game has to waste time programming trees, sculpting trees, making tree textures, and so on and so forth.

        What if instead you could just download the tree file everyone has worked on, added more to it if you wanted, then re-upload the tree file for someone else to use? Now you have multiple iterations of the tree with varying levels of fidelity and no known bugs for the Generic Gaming Program.

        The closest we have to this are various game engines like Source and Unreal. But even those have limitations because the companies working on them don't share with each other (it'd turn into a monopoly and made illegal). And of course this could apply to any field, from automotives to food products.

        I'm sure I'm just describing Dengism or some shit but I'm too much of a lib that hasn't read enough theory to realize smarter people than I am wrote books about this decades ago and it's foundational to multiple schools of communist thought.

  • Didnt they drop a teaser for OD as well? Not just death stranding 2. There are so many games coming out all the time i'm always falling behind anyway, I dont think more slop faster is necessary

  • Are getting? I feel like we've already been at that point for a while now

    Edit: Plus, games are getting too long and bloated. 100+ hours is a lot for a single playthrough

  • Maybe an unpopular opinion but:

    I like games with good mechanics and satisfying loops. I take a Teardown over Horizon Zero Dawn any time. Both games are great, but one focused it's resources on one thing they really owned, the other is a playable movie.

    A GTA clone with simulated reactions of the environment, based on player actions would be as fun as the designed stuff. Even if it's wonky it feels more real.

    Imagine Rockstar would do Dwarf-Fortress. They could never reach this depth with their team of 1000 in 10 years because they would do the mechanics "manually". Look at GTA5 and how sterile the world feels while it looks amazing. Shooting down a Plane? No reaction at all. Give me Minecraft graphics and simulate the emergency/social/media/physical response for such an disaster based on existing game rules. That would be fun. (And is the secret of Indie games like Rainworld, DF, Teardown, CDDA, Minecraft, Project Zomboid, .... and the new Zelda Games or Space-Engineers).

    I would even like to see how a game like "Facade" would turn out today with the support of LLM for the dialogue.

    Or: Remember Serious Sam? 100ds of enemies at once? Why are there no games with Serious Sam 2 graphics and 1000nds of Enemies? Why does everything have to be that "polished".

    • "Emerging Complexity" is one of the new buzzwords in game design, so hopefully you get your wish sooner or later.

  • Oh no, looks like you'll have nothing to play, because the only games that are ever available to play are ones released in the past 5 years. There definitely is not a cumulative total of games that is more than you could ever imagine playing in 5 whole lifetimes, no sir. You're literally going to have to stare at a wall for 12 months straight while you wait for Death Stranding 2. Consider it practice/mental toning for the actual game.

  • And it's not even chief evil for gigacorp games, if anything, corpos tend to have better, though still sucking development times, but new norm is sitting on popular franchises doing nothing for years and decades. Indies and small companies got real fucking problems with dev hells. I follow games that are in development for a literal decade, they aren't fake since some progress is done, but release is nowhere close. Or the ones which are in development for years and when they release it's still early access with years more, and this can't be even explained by lack of manpower, those games aren't substantially different in scope of those from 20 years ago.

73 comments