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General discussionAAA games delays(28 posts)(28 posts)
(28 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted January 21, 2020
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ZyloxDragon: I don't pick up games once they're released anymore. Too expensive, buggy, and missing content. I'd rather wait 2 or 3 extra years for the edition with all the DLCs and patches released, while at 50% of what the base game was released at. I think I'm in the minority with this choice though.
I do the same thing. I doubt you're the minority here, at least.
Posted January 21, 2020
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idbeholdME: I buy games on release extremely rarely, so doesn't bother me much. And as long as it doesn't evolve into another Duke Nukem Forever situation, I think delays are acceptable.
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Sarafan: There's nothing that can beat the Duke Nukem Forever delays and I hope we won't see anything like that in the future. :)
Oh I don’t know. Bannerlord is certainly giving it a good go. What is it 12 years now, and it’s only coming as early access this year, so plenty of wait yet.
Posted January 21, 2020
People in pretty much all industries work to deadlines, realistic or otherwise. Otherwise we would just sit on our asses getting paid and nothing would ever get done. We would procrastinate and keep adding "features" and making excuses to not get things finshed. Deadlines are usually initially unrealistic, but it's something to aim at.

Games have always been delayed, you just didn't always know about it. Games have always had content cut to get them out on time and budget, you just didn't know about it (The Secret on Mana had 60% of its content cut, did you know that?). Games have always been released with bugs and always will be.

We live in the real world, not la la land, the people working on your games are doing the best they can.
Post edited January 21, 2020 by CMOT70
Posted January 22, 2020
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ZyloxDragon: I don't pick up games once they're released anymore. Too expensive, buggy, and missing content. I'd rather wait 2 or 3 extra years for the edition with all the DLCs and patches released, while at 50% of what the base game was released at. I think I'm in the minority with this choice though.
I'm part of that minority, too. And doing this has another great advantage: You save a lot on hardware! Any recent mid-range GPU will run such ancient titles easily at highest settings ;)
Posted January 22, 2020
I would be absolutely fine with the scaling back of game scale. AAA is seriously overrated and dangerous.
Posted January 22, 2020
Not really. They set a timeline and try to meet those goals. If they fail to do so they re-evaluate their timeline and inform the masses. The only problem is when they wait to do inform people until the 11th hour. The game is set to come out, then bam, they tell everyone it will be another six months and they've known that for at least four.
Posted January 22, 2020
On too early announcements: I don't mind it at all. I think It's better to gauge gamers' expectations early during the project preproduction phase and set your own expectations (time/money to allocate, scope, projected sales) based on that. It's better than being panicked after gamers don't respond positively to an annoucement of a game you've worked in secret for two-three years.
Posted January 22, 2020
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Sarafan: establishment of this new "standard".
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LootHunter: What do you mean by "new"? Delays happent to many games from the very establishment of game industry.
Quite a famous incident way back in the 90s when Westwood showed their first trailer for their Blade Runner game, set obviously in the future, one journo asked what an ad in the trailer was for - another journo quick as a whip got in with "Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun - Coming Soon."

I think people also forget how often games became vaporware, the indefinite delay until eventually everyone stops talking about it.

Because the industry is so much larger, and so much more publicised and marketed now, I think it's just a much more noticeable thing.

Personally, meh, I'd rather see delays than catastrophic game launches and less crunch and less crushed developers, although sadly, in this case I think they'll still be hard crunch for these teams.
Posted January 22, 2020
I think it's a good thing they delay to release a more complete product. I wait on a lot of games for a more finished and patched version, but for those games you really want to play ASAP... like Cyberpunk... it's always annoying to see the good patches release after you finished the game.

That said I do think there's two things they need to do:

1) Don't announce release dates so far off. Give a target window maybe ("2020!") but don't be like Cyberpunk where they announce an official date with pre-orders unless you KNOW that date will be met, or at least very close to it (FF7's delay is only a few weeks).

2) Scale back on the scope. It's pretty obvious Dying Light 2 in particular is trying to be this massive thing, but did the sales and hype around the first really demand that? You might end up putting more and more time and money into it and then go into the negative. Sometimes it's better to scale back than to continually dive deeper. The hits of the last decade show you don't need some endlessly amazing high budget looking game to be a big hit.
Posted January 22, 2020
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StingingVelvet: I think it's a good thing they delay to release a more complete product. I wait on a lot of games for a more finished and patched version, but for those games you really want to play ASAP... like Cyberpunk... it's always annoying to see the good patches release after you finished the game.

That said I do think there's two things they need to do:

1) Don't announce release dates so far off. Give a target window maybe ("2020!") but don't be like Cyberpunk where they announce an official date with pre-orders unless you KNOW that date will be met, or at least very close to it (FF7's delay is only a few weeks).

2) Scale back on the scope. It's pretty obvious Dying Light 2 in particular is trying to be this massive thing, but did the sales and hype around the first really demand that? You might end up putting more and more time and money into it and then go into the negative. Sometimes it's better to scale back than to continually dive deeper. The hits of the last decade show you don't need some endlessly amazing high budget looking game to be a big hit.
I agree on dying light 2. They seem to be bolting loads of things onto it, coop play, faction balancing, real world altering choices, for instance. None of which is necessary. The first is great because you can run around killing things, simple. Just needed a new world, a new half assed storyline to provide some reason, and more guns and weapons. Who gives two pokes if your “choices” matter, or if some group is upset, it’s not the point of such a game.
But, unfortunately the gaming community expect these things, so everything has to have them. Am sure there will be crafting too. Maybe the ability to build a settlement yourself, all other standard industry things.
Posted January 22, 2020
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nightcraw1er.488: I agree on dying light 2. They seem to be bolting loads of things onto it, coop play, faction balancing, real world altering choices, for instance. None of which is necessary. The first is great because you can run around killing things, simple. Just needed a new world, a new half assed storyline to provide some reason, and more guns and weapons. Who gives two pokes if your “choices” matter, or if some group is upset, it’s not the point of such a game.
I don't think there's anything wrong with have the goal of adding things like choice and consequence to the design, but if it's taking too long and too much money to implement, you have to make the hard choice to scale back. Movies do this all the time, they scale back from the script and storyboards when they start looking at the runtime and effects budget and whatnot. I feel like games all too often get stuck in a quagmire of aiming to do too much and refusing to cut back when they have to.
Posted January 23, 2020
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Sarafan: Don't you think that developers should be less optimistic when announcing the release dates of their games? I understand that we'll get better games as a result of this policy.
Companies like EA live on crunch (and not paying out nearly enough to employees), and ruin lives.

But a number of games also seem to not sell as well when they require a lot of patches or are dog**** and maybe just maybe they are deciding the customerbase is more important than the stock holders...

But we'll have to see...
Posted January 23, 2020
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LootHunter: What do you mean by "new"? Delays happent to many games from the very establishment of game industry.
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Icinix: Quite a famous incident way back in the 90s when Westwood showed their first trailer for their Blade Runner game, set obviously in the future, one journo asked what an ad in the trailer was for - another journo quick as a whip got in with "Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun - Coming Soon."

I think people also forget how often games became vaporware, the indefinite delay until eventually everyone stops talking about it.

Because the industry is so much larger, and so much more publicised and marketed now, I think it's just a much more noticeable thing.
I seem to remember PC Gamer (UK) having a recurring mini-feature called Slippage Central to collect project delays together. A bit of Googling produced examples from 2000 and 2003:

https://halo.bungie.org/news.html?item=1624
https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/swg-not-comming-out-beyond-conus.51577/#post-1245115
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussionAAA games delays(28 posts)(28 posts)
(28 posts)