Long Dev Time Equals Better Game? 88
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."
Based on My Experience (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course that doesn't make sense to the publisher, but it really would be the way to get the best games as an end result. You would (or maybe wouldn't) be surprised at how much stuff has been cut out of the games that I've worked on, ALWAYS due to lack of time.
Trying to crunch the development cycle pretty much always just perpetuates this lack of time, no matter how many people you have on the project. When people start going fast they make mistakes. Sometimes they make structural mistakes, or don't think systems out enough before they start implementing. This stuff really bites you further down the line. And forget about having time to go back and clean up existing systems, that oppertunity is very very rare.
Of course these things aren't really game specific, I'm sure people in other lines of work have seen similar trends.
EVE Online... (Score:5, Interesting)
http://myeve.eve-online.com/download/videos/?type
http://myeve.eve-online.com/download/videos/Defau
Re:Three Words: (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:I have one name: (Score:4, Interesting)
the primary risk of a long dev period (Score:5, Interesting)
KOTOR (Score:2, Interesting)
Also, many felt that KOTOR2 was so rushed that the storyline suffered as a result. In fact, a petition [petitiononline.com] was raised surrounding that very point.
I have to agree, longer dev times can only help a game's success. I personally would rather have a functional game with cool features and better story than an early release for a poorer product.