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
uncritical support to no crunch time
Idk supergiant (I think I’ve heard they are fairly tight inside) seems fine doing one small game in three years? Instead of yearly ubisoft slop (they make them like in 2? Or did they switch to 3?)
Larian or rockstar do like one in 5 years (although rockstar sucks on working part)
The next patch is coming any day now!
I tell myself this every day for the last month because I want to see what comes next so badly.
I'm not on PC though so I need to wait until it's fully out before I get to enjoy it
rockstar do like one in 5 years
yeah rockstar makes games that take so much effort that they probably shouldn't exist at all, so they take a long time to make even under awful crunch conditions
I’m kinda fine-ish with eye candy, it could be neat on a budget 5 years later, scope though grinds my gears, don’t need your square kilometers of procedurally generated forest with dick to show for it except randomly placed animals. I want to get lost in a forest I will go to a real forest. Same for half the cities, like I get how gta landed there, but as a result walking in that game feels just wasteful in time
Except if youre only playing the games with cutting edge graphics 5 years later then they could just make games with 5 year old graphics tech and you could play brand new games and youd still have identical graphical experiences.
I don’t think game dev changes that much (timewise) with older graphics but same scope (maybe I’m wrong), you still have to have artist design this shit with lighting, surfaces, colors etc, it doesn’t (again, I suspect, not a dev) become that simpler/faster just because you used ue4 instead of ue5 to draw a city, for example. If you spend roughly same time, it’s probably a wash what you used.
Surely this means games are higher quality and more enjoyable now right?
higher quality
Of course! It'll use generative AI to bring us 8K graphics.
I'm not up to date with the latest lore. What's the next "after server meshing NOW the game will be ready?" technology or are we still waiting on server meshing?
They've started live testing server meshing and its hilarious because when it actually works you realise they didnt design any facet of the game for more than 20 players at a time. There literally arnt enough habs for people to spawn in, way to little elevators and screens. Everything is diagetic but in such limited quantities that when they did the 1000 player test (Which only got to 750 before crashing) people had to form actual queues to use the terminals to spawn ships. Unlike a lot of people I'm pretty confident they'll eventually release a proper game I just dont think it will be any fun at all. They just keep making the game more and more tedious in the name of "realism".
They just keep making the game more and more tedious in the name of “realism”.
This is common theme in the games "made by players for players" because the players making this game are always hardcore minmaxers and anti-fun brigadiers, which is pretty logical since only they get so royally pissed by devs not catering to them specifically that they attempt to do better. Normal player would just leave unfun game behind and move to next one.
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
Yeah it sucks
Back when I dreamed of being a game dev I went back to college for it and they taught this bullshit in the class
This got me curious so I, too, went and looked it up. Here I thought it would be something like Object-Oriented Design, Functional Programming, or Procedural Programming.
No. It's literally just micromanagement bullshit used by suits to make themselves look useful when they don't know shit about shit. Why the fuck would schools teach that instead of ways to push back against it?
One look at the fucking incestuous flow chart made me feel nausea. How the hell does anything get fucking done?
Real Agile has never been tried™️
...but unironically. Incompetent middle managers get hung up on ritual over purpose, and think that the whole methodology is a one-size-fits-all approach that will magically solve budget, delivery timeline, and quality control problems.
For my own small projects I use plain old waterfall and shit just gets done. No idea how it works on larger projects but if I'm not mistaken this was how we made games back when Majora's Mask was completed in 1 year (they reused OOC's engine so it was real easy stares at all UE5 projects taking decades to release)
Waterfall was literally presented by its "creator" (Winston W. Royce) back in 1970 as an example of how not to manage a software project due to the lack of testing and validation until all implementation is complete (meaning, no integration or regression testing is performed as features are added during initial construction). This is also kind of the source of the axiom that, "The first 80% of the project takes 80% of the time, and the last 20% of the project also takes 80% of the time," in reference to the prevalence of budget overruns and missed deadlines/estimates once integration testing actually starts.
It's fine for trivial projects, and iterative methodologies (e.g., Agile/Agile variants, XP, etc.) use sort of a mini-waterfall phase on a per-feature basis. You're still performing the same activities, and often in the same sequence; you just toss out the rigidity of only performing each of those activities once for the entire project and thus introducing a fuckton of risk. Unfortunately, Agile became a weird cult religion at some point and a lot of managers are more interested in holding constant meetings than letting developers build software. Honestly, it has been hilarious watching my own IT org try to adopt some semblance of Agile principles while absolutely not changing their mentality or approach to anything; it's like watching a monkey sodomizing a football, but like, with my paycheck. I hate it here. Send help. Or nukes.
Leave your job, start a construction firm doing agile housing builds
Show
That's more or less how our various faux-Agile software projects turned out, between lack of defined requirements, half-assed architecture, and a parade of revolving-door third-party contractors with little to no oversight beyond endless stand-up meetings. No code reviews, no documented QA standards or coding standard, no documented testing requirements, just "git 'er dun" followed by dawning horror when they see the issue backlog get worse with each bugfix since all of the contractors left without leaving behind any real documentation or knowledge transfer. Again, I'd find it hilarious if my own paycheck weren't on the line in the midst of all this. Oh well; toxic management gonna toxically mismanage.
Okay thanks for clarifying that, iterating is definitely necessary, I didn't think "waterfall" actually meant literally no iteration whatsoever
I'm actually certified in a version of SCRUM. I've been on a total of one project which did it in what I would say is the correct way. Where the primary purpose was to gauge work and plan around the developers capabilities and needs, instead of having deadlines imposed arbitrarily from the top. It worked great and we delivered a useful tool in a relatively quick period with pretty inexperienced devs.
Every other time though it's a poor excuse for managers to waste time with useless metrics reporting and whip the devs into coding faster.
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.
If you suggested that to Hideo Kojima, he might think it's genuinely a great idea. I'd play that
I almost do too. They've got a lot of my NES era favorites like Contra and Ninja Gaiden, Metal Gear which is a series I hold very very deeply to my heart, I wouldn't br posting here if they didn't push me in a direction as an early teen. And then there's silent hill. Don't even get me started on castlevania. Konami owns a lot of my favorite vidya series
Ohhh! I had to play slur wheel of fortune there. As far as Konami goes, they should give me their properties cause I know what to do with all of em. Including not making any more metal gear games except one that I'll call MGS6: The Metal Gear and it will just be a disc containing a video of me reading an affidavit that metal gear ended with mgs3 and there was no 4 or 5 and peace walker is on thin fucking ice. Then it would show Hideo Kojima signing it at gunpoint (I'd use a prop gun), then I'd let him make whatever he wants and keep kojipro for himself and just kinda give him whatever he asks for. I'd be so busy making awesome 2d sidescrolling action games that cost like $5 and a new one is out every few weeks cause I've got modern day Konami just making snes level games. Really the only high budget thing would be Silent Hill and I'd hire fucking David Lynch to write it before emphysema gets him
You'll need to infiltrate Konamis headquarters on Shadow Moses Island and destroy the final weapon, capitalism
Ninja Gaiden belongs to Tecmo Koei, not that they're doing much with it or Dead or Alive anymore
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
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.
Seems like dev times are either way too long or games are rushed out too early these days with almost no middle ground
I broadly agree but I don't think that Kojimbo is the best example lol, isn't part of why he got fired from Konami that he was taking too long on MGSV?
I also think that part of the reason for longer dev times/cycles between games is that everything wants to be a GaaS, so development is continuing for a longer period after release.
When it comes to Elder Scrolls 6, idk, Todd just don't got the magic anymore.
Elder Scrolls 6 is pretty easy to explain, they simply were not working on it, focused entirely on Starfield. That teaser from years ago was a distraction to make you think they were still working on it, and to get shareholders to shut up about them not putting out the next installment.
I'm more interested in that Daggerfall spiritual successor honestly
That teaser was outright fake, they published it literally 2 days after failout 76 caused nearly a literal riot with how shit it was.
Even indie games take years and years, although it makes more sense for them. Silksong still has no release date right?
I mean, if I were to start my dream game tomorrow, it would take a while since I'd also have a job. Plenty of indie games are like that
I’m just glad to get another Civ game this decade. I just hope it’s as good as Civ 6
I've tried to get into other 4X's like Europa, Stellaris CK but the learning curve is pretty high admittedly! I'll give Europa another shot someday.
I actually welcome how each Civ tries to do something different, but the districts in 6 are such a huge addition that I'm a little sad they won't return in 7 in the same fashion. Nothing lights up my monkey brain like finding a +6 Campus/IZ/Harbor tile
If there's one thing I worry for 7, it's that the fanbase for 5 is very vocal online. I enjoyed 5 for what it was at its time but going back now it seems TOO simple with the streamlined culture tree and the overemphasis on building Tall. It's a 4X game, turtling at 4 cities is no fun!! The less influence the better.
I started with Civ Rev I for the PS3, I appreciate the goofy art style in 6 haha.
There was plenty of civ-like games in recent 2 years, but all of them were boring.
I played Old World and it was pretty boring, though definitely best of the crop, maybe they improved it since release? I also don't like warfare in Civ, something like 95% of my playtroughs since original civ1 were not warlike ones. My favourite tactics was always PRODUCTIVE FORCES all caps.
I like all manners of 4x and grand strategy games, though i must say that even though i don't play in Civ lately, it has been possibly the most consistently fun series of all strategy games, i enjoyed all games greatly except Civ 3, which makes it a whooping 5/6 great games (and Colonization and especially Alpha Centauri were also good).
And they have like half the dev time because they don't make everything from scratch every time
Death stranding was announced in 2016 (probably been in dev since 2015) and released in 2019, that's 3-4 years. With the basic gameplay already done, and a lot of systems already locked down, how the fuck does Death Stranding 2 take 5-6 years to make? What are they making?
I do think they (Kojiprod) didn't even consider a sequel until after COVID. If I remember well, in some interviews Kojima mentioned that the first game would have been completely different if the lockdown had happened during development time, and it is implied that DS2 is a direct response to it.
Now here's the thing, even with that information in mind (let's say Kojima starts writing in 2021, and preprod follows), they should still not take as long, because the core systems are already there, so I'm not sure what's taking so long. My guess would be scanning/filming for cutscenes, because at this point it's going to be more of a movie than a game
That's a good point, I imagine the new environments take some time to build too.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
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
