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."

I have one name:

[IMarvinTPA]

Daikatana

IMarv

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.

Three Words:

[Lally Singh]

Mythical Man Month

Re:More data points

[SharpFang]

I wonder about The Elder Scrolls.

It's always delayed by a few months.
It's always unplayable until the first service pack is released.

Shouldn't they delay it by another few monts instead?

Software development is like having a crap

[LiquidCoooled]

Sometimes you strain and strain and strain for what feels like hours and are sorely dissapointed by the piffly splash.
Othertimes without even trying your bowels fall out and you almost get swept away by the tidal wave wake it causes.

Don't rush development and for gods sake, flush afterwards.

I have code that I've been holding off developing for a while now - the ideas are still fresh and there isn't any market competition, however I just don't feel relaxed enough to code it yet. The time will come, I'm not going to rush it.

Re:Duke?

[tont0r]

You are making this comment under the assuption that someone is actually WORKING on the game.

Computer Projects

[paladinwannabe2]

There was a computer science teacher a year ago (or so) who took a survey of how long it took his class to do various programming assignments. It turned out that there was no connection between how long the student spent on the assignment and what grade he got on it.

I suspect it's the same with video games- one person with a great idea and good programming skill could program the next "Geometry Wars" in a couple months, while some shovelware games have taken huge groups of people years. (Daikatana is the first that pops into everyone's head, but there have been others). Don't judge a game by how much time has been spent on it- it's like saying a movie will be good because it had a high budget.

It really comes down to how development is managed

[tokengeekgrrl]

Whether it's a team of 5 developers or 500, if there isn't someone paying attention to the overall picture and architecture of a software product, be it a game or CMS, it's going to take longer.

I've worked on teams of 10 or less where everything was disorganized and took forever to complete, regardless of additional resources, and ones where there was a Tech Lead making sure everything was on track enabling us to produce far more than we had promised under schedule.

I've also worked in a big company on larger teams and the same logic holds true. An incompetent manager meant lots of programmers stepping on each others toes and producing conflicting code. A competent manager meant lots of parallel and complementary development.

Disclaimer: Of course, I'm generalizing based upon my anecdotal experience and leaving out a ton of external factors that affect development, (funding, policy, overriding and sometimes harmful decisions of executive management), so this is just my overall impression based upon my limited work experience that did NOT involve game development.

- tokengeekgrrl

Good Grief

[BruceTheBruce]

I guess the money men like to have some concrete metrics they can hang their hats on, but the hard truth is just that CREATIVE TEAMS make great games. Without a good vision and good creative people behind it, no amount of time will make the game great.

Re:More data points

[ninjamonkey]

I wonder about The Elder Scrolls. It's always delayed by a few months. It's always unplayable until the first service pack is released.

If by "The Elder Scrolls" you mean "Daggerfall", I agree with you 100%.

Arena and Morrowind were most certainly playable out of the box (and yes, Morrowind was delayed probably to make certain that it was not buggy to the point of being unplayable).

To me, the recipe for a good game is mostly two-fold:

1) Ample time spent in PRE-PRODUCTION! Making sure that the game concepts work and that the project plan is as thought-out as possible. A "gameplay proof-of-concept" before full development begins (artwork, music, etc). If ample time is put into pre-production, there's a smaller chance that the game will have to be completely reworked mid-development, which most of the time results in a crappy and late product.

2) A cohesive team of developers that believe in the project, WHO ARE SUPPORTED by their parent company and given the necessary amount of time to achieve the game's potential. This means not shipping a half-baked product just to release before Christmas.

Re:the primary risk of a long dev period

[qeveren]

... because god forbid that someone might end up playing a game that isn't based on an absolute bleeding edge engine of some sort. I mean, nobody plays the original Counterstrike anymore, that's ancient! :)

Re:I have one name:

[/ASCII]

The article is about the development of a PS2 game. On consoles you don't have that kind of problem. You know from day one what your target system is like, and you can write for that one specific piece of hardware. (Not true for first gen titles, which is one of the reasons they look so much worse than later titles)