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)

Surely this means games are higher quality and more enjoyable now right?

Star Citizen is on over a decade of development time and is approaching a billion dollars in rube investments.

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, 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.

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 but did they spend $200+ million per game?

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.

Even indie games take years and years, although it makes more sense for them. Silksong still has no release date right?

Seems like dev times are either way too long or games are rushed out too early these days with almost no middle ground

RGG's Yakuza games are the only good games at this point.

I’m just glad to get another Civ game this decade. I just hope it’s as good as Civ 6

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?

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

good games take time to develop and there are already way too many games

Maybe an unpopular opinion but:

I like games with good mechanics and satisfying loops. I take a Teardown over Horizon Zero Dawn any time. Both games are great, but one focused it's resources on one thing they really owned, the other is a playable movie.

A GTA clone with simulated reactions of the environment, based on player actions would be as fun as the designed stuff. Even if it's wonky it feels more real.

Imagine Rockstar would do Dwarf-Fortress. They could never reach this depth with their team of 1000 in 10 years because they would do the mechanics "manually". Look at GTA5 and how sterile the world feels while it looks amazing. Shooting down a Plane? No reaction at all. Give me Minecraft graphics and simulate the emergency/social/media/physical response for such an disaster based on existing game rules. That would be fun. (And is the secret of Indie games like Rainworld, DF, Teardown, CDDA, Minecraft, Project Zomboid, .... and the new Zelda Games or Space-Engineers).

I would even like to see how a game like "Facade" would turn out today with the support of LLM for the dialogue.

Or: Remember Serious Sam? 100ds of enemies at once? Why are there no games with Serious Sam 2 graphics and 1000nds of Enemies? Why does everything have to be that "polished".