When you can literally change the entire game over time with updates to be something entirely different from what it was: Suck isn’t forever. But neither is good.
Even the perceptions don’t necessarily stay forever. Look at NMS.
Ironically, this was contadicted in the same documentary by the Half-Life devs when they were talking about Xen and how they were aware that it kinda sucked but the deadline was coming up…
It’s just not true anymore, especially with Steam. If a game releases in a sucky, broken state where more development time was definitely needed, nowadays the game companies will often just fix those games over time.
Well it stills impacts the game and the brand, The smash-like game that got out in Beta that was almost great has fallen down to me not remmebering the name of the game because it was not memorable enough and not fully polished. They will have a second chance then the game will “fully launch” but for a lot of people the Beta launh was the full laucnh
Yeah, 100%. If a game gets released in a mediocre unfinished state, and it doesn’t capture the attention of the player base back then it can certainly kill the game, I agree completely.
However, my original comment was mostly referring to the fact that games can be updated nowadays, unlike in the older days when you bought a game (when buying games was mostly done via retail stores and physical copies) and if the game was bad, it would be bad forever. There’s also the fact that there were a couple of high-profile cases where the game came out clearly unfinished or even unplayable (such as Fallout 76 and Cyberpunk 2077) that have fixed themselves, and if you were to mention that the game was bad at launch and how it was a bad business practice, you’d immediately get told to shut up and to look at what state the game is now.
The art is a fair bit more detailed, but I’m fascinated with whatever might be taking them so long. The original took about two years to finish and is ridiculously polished, so doubling the development time is wild. Is Hornet’s movement system just terrifically prone to breaking? Is the game simply gargantuan? Did they make a game of sneezing into each other’s coffee and lose a few years to the kitchen camping meta? All equally possible.
No game should be shipped broken, but sometimes concessions are a reality.
Even Half-Life had to make concessions. Xen is infamously less polished and fine tuned than the rest of the game. Valve didn’t have infinite resources and time to keep tinkering. Would the game have been better? Maybe. But time is money, and Half-Life already ended up selling huge. Would taking time to fine tune Xen have boosted sales? Were people in the 90s avoiding the game because of Xen? I don’t think so.
The profits from Half Life allowed Valve to make more games and be successful. Is it worth trading off a more fine tuned Xen in order to have Valve exist as we know it today?
In the documentary, they actually expand on that, they delayed the core game until the story and levels worked out and specially left Xen to the last as if they were not having fun before, they would have given up
I know. Perhaps I was not being clear in my point.
Xen was made last, and Valve never could quite get it to the same quality as the rest of the game.
If we follow the logic, which many commenters have, that “games should only be released 100% finished” then Half-Life should have been delayed indefinitely until Xen was as polished as the rest of the game.
I was making the point that Xen is an example of Valve deciding part of their game is “good enough” and shipping it, rather than continually extending development.
There are realities of game development that even Valve isn’t immune to.
A lot of the time in the industry, developers are using money loaned by publishers. Things like getting more development time, which means asking for more money is a negotiation that the devs aren’t guaranteed to win.
Valve is one of the successful developer & publisher companies that managed to survive. The 90s were a much smaller time for video games, and a small startup like Valve could compete with the big names out there. They had more freedom in a sense, but they also were taking quite a gamble. Other companies tried the same and didn’t survive.
It’s easy to simply say “only release a game when it’s 100% done” but it’s a lot harder when you’re watching money that keeps your company afloat dwindle with each delay. Also, “100% done” is a very flexible concept. Games almost always have to cut content or make concessions in some way, so figuring out what a done version looks like while working on it can be difficult.
The modern version of a small Valve style startup would be something like a Kickstarter funded development. Again, unless you are (for some reason) a Star Citizen dev, people are going to stop giving you money and you have limited funds and thus limited development time.
And just because you delay to try and release a superior game doesn’t mean it will be a smash hit.
Also it’s fucking expensive to market things so people are aware you just released it. Or at least it used to be, before wish lists, early access, and so on.
This is true, but gamers are so impatient. I am in early access with my Virtual Reality Theme Park and have been busting it for 3 years as a solo dev, and of course it is not a full Theme Park yet. What does exist has put me into the top 10 on the Meta Quest App Lab store, but I get bounced out of the top 10 now and then as I will get 3* saying new rides are not coming fast enough. People are so impatient just like shareholders.
Perhaps. I suppose saying: “Delaying a game which is making coherent progress is better than forcing devs to cut their work short.” is a much less catchy quote.
Duke Nukem Forever suffered both from not giving the appropriate development time to a single workflow, and from the related problem of upper manglement constantly demanding changing the game so much it was like starting over again and again.
The leaked 2001 Duke Nukem build is promising. If the devs had been supported in focusing on that rather than constantly retooling the game to chase trends, it may have at least been decent.
It can also be difficult to determine when a game has had enough development time. Pretty much every game considered good or great has had some content cut for development time reasons. At the end of the day, somebody does have to be the person who reigns in the excess.
Sometimes cut content would have been better if left in, sometimes cutting it was clearly a good choice.
And then there’s the simple reality that a studio that delays too much risks going under, which kills that game and all future games by them, so when is good enough good enough to ship a game?
There’s only so much delaying can help a badly designed game, delaying only really helps those games that need that extra polish and likely won’t be receiving it afterwards.
Time was the issue. They ran out of time waiting for GRM, so they went their own way. If they had waited… We’d still be waiting, but wouldn’t have gotten the suck.
You mean if they’d been competent show runners in the first place.
The show was great when it was based off of good writing.
Then it got sketchy as they had to rely on GRRM’s notes.
Then the notes got more vague, and season 7 and 8 turned into garbage.
Conclusion: D&D were mediocre show runners who couldn’t hire competent writers, and thought game of thrones was about subverting expectations instead of strong character arcs.
Justifiably, it lost them their next gig.
HBO was willing to wait for good seasons. But D&D wanted to get into a Star Wars contract with Disney. They rushed season 8 out the door with lazy writing to get that Star Wars deal.
After season 8 traumatized GOT fans and bombed in reviews, Disney backed out of the deal, and D&D have fallen into obscurity.
To be fair, CS2 sucks for people already heavily trained on older versions of CS. Newcomers will have a significantly better experience on CS2 than CS:GO.
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