Why is it that up until about 2006 game development took around a year; with 3 or so years being a extremely long time? Since then outside of a handful of series games are taking 5+ years to be made only to come out as a broken mess.
Watchdogs took 5 years to make, Fallout 4 took 4-6 years depending how you view it, Final Fantasy XV took like 10 years, Gran Turismo 7 took 5 years, and you can keep going for pretty much every "major" release in the last decade.
The absolute drought can be felt even in person as gamestores and game sections in big stores are absolutely tiny compared to how large they were in years prior.
Is it just complete incompetence or lack of care that does this?
Browns and women
Your western games were always shit except for a small handful of extremely uncommon cases such as pre-Microsoft Bethesda or pre-Microsoft Rare
Why are Japanese games bad now?
Brainlet needs spoonfeeding
Whites and men
In 2006 you could write a plot where your character had to rape 500 women to save earth and it'd be OK.
Now ever small change has to run through 13 rounds of committees to determine if somebody MIGHT take offense
Indies, solo one man armies and small A teams of 10 lads shouldn't have this problems.
Those get fricked by the absolute lack of pressure from Early Access
Paycheck extension.
>The absolute drought can be felt even in person as gamestores and game sections in big stores are absolutely tiny compared to how large they were in years prior.
You can't seriously think development time of games is the reason for this, i refuse to believe you do.
>game development times and costs increase
>less games come out
>stores downsize due to less games coming out
Pretty sound logic
If you're a dumbshit. The reasons for stores downgrading are due to the internet, either people buying games physically from online stores or digitally.
>Why is it that up until about 2006 game development took around a year
It didn't. It took 3/4 years for Pokémon Gold/Silver to come out.
in 2006 israelites figured out that by artificially lengthening video game development cycles they would be able to manufacture more rage, hype and divisiveness while doing less actual work.
Scale.
Dev teams used to consist of 50-100 people maximum. This made the pipeline and general communication much easier, since the entire collective had clear goals with deadlines and could relay those to one another. Now dev teams average 1000+ in the AAA sphere, with groups entirely separate from one another, never ever once talking to one another, and all info is passed between a handful of team managers who oversee 100+ people by themselves. This gross inflation of teams combined with game development education courses is also the reason in-house engines have fallen to the wayside. Newbies are trained on platforms like Unreal 5, it's all they know, which is why you'll find most modern development teams only work on engines such as Unreal 5. CDPR hired so much foreign talent after the exodus of old staff post-Cyberpunk that they had to move away from RED Engine, the newbies have no idea how to use it.
Everything became too commercialized, too many middleman, too many people. Too many cooks in the kitchen as it's called. It leads to confusion, poor quality seeping through the cracks, nobody able to catch it because each person is developing one 4K texture for the hundreds of thousands of objects in their game. Gameplay elements smashed together by entirely different teams with varying levels of coding quality. Outsourcing what can't be completed now to Indian studios who hand back code that may as well be in Spanglish, barely legible to the team it was given to.
How was that for you or before with the communication and all infos from the managers than now?
If no one talks to anyone, how can a good solid end product come about...
It used to be if I have a question, or general feedback, I'd go talk to Bob who was e.g. the head of general gameplay design and figure out what was going on, and we'd work from there. See what I needed translated to the user interface and what was paramount information for the player, we'd hash things out and he'd likewise feedback on my concept designs and early prototypes. Now it's if I have a question, I relay it to my team manager who has no fricking clue what's going on beyond an overarching series of bullet points, and any attempts to get him to communicate with the other team manager takes days of coercing before he even tries, and what I'll get back is a confusing series of bullet points from the other team generalized by their team manager.
Endless Chinese whisper bullshit. It's why I quit and moved to commercial software. It's the same experience except I get paid more than double.
Half the budgets are getting laundered to diversity officers or whatever the frick
Since the existence of things like the smartphone and social media, ~~*they*~~ noticed how much money mobile gaming was making. That lead to them incorporating things like micro-transactions into triple a titles while also hyping games up on social media for clicks and sh*t. Even though a game nowadays goes through a long development cycle it doesn’t matter as long as consumers get constantly hyped up for years. They’ve psychologically Stockholm syndrome’d consumers into constantly buying and accepting unfinished mediocre crap for years now. The gaming community and culture has also changed since events like Gamergate and now you also see how big gaming companies have to be “inclusive” with their hires.
>consoles just sitting there
>not even locked behind a plastic door that you have to ask an employee to open
A simpler time.
consumer expectations have ballooned thanks to modern technological and gaming trends. one guy with a dos pc could slap any bullshit together and sell 100k copies. nowadays that shit doesnt fly. even from indie games, consumers have disgustingly inflated expectations in regards to graphical fidelity, multiplayer and open world features that make it a fricking nightmare to make anything.
the most popular games among the broader consumer base right now is shit like The Last Of Us, God Of War and Zelda ToTK, each of which had hundreds of millions of dollars in budget and thousands of developers working across the globe for YEARS to develop.
simply put, consumers demand every game to have the next gen everything, to be bigger and realer than the last. indie games can and do make smaller scale experiences (Hades, Dusk, Decarnation etc come to mind) but they simply cannot compete against the development behemoths that make up the majority of triple A development.
so before you could shit out a game that was just text and some shitty sprites that took 3 hours to beat and people would eat it up. now you have to compete against thousands of releases which means spending more time developing an art style, mechanics, story etc.
>game development took around a year
No way Ocarina took ages to make and had enough left over content to make two whole games out of.
OoT took 4 years to make, at that point in time that was considered development hell (because it was lol) 4 years now is normal.
This would be true if not for the fact buying games on the internet was already a thing for nearly a decade prior, longer if you count mail ordering shit. There are just less games out now than before.
More complex games require more effort to make.
Prettier graphics take more time to perfect.
It’s pretty simple really.
Games have not gotten more complex, most of modern games is just a bunch of middleware thrown together and then patched daily for 1-6 years until it works or they give up.
or the studio folds
Because up until 2005 games were 5 to 10 hours long and content Black folk would have a heart attack today if that happened.
The frick are you talking about? Most older games took a lot longer to beat then these days. Balders gate was hundreds of hours for example.
System shock: 15-20 hours
Half Life: 15 hours
Half Life 2: 20 hours
Halo: 10-15 hours
Morrowind: 40-100 hours
Fallout: 16-24 hours
Fallout 2: 30-50 hours
Age of Empires: 20-30 hours
The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask: 20-30 hours
Metal Gear solid 2: 13 hours
Deus Ex: 23-30 hours
Grand Theft Auto San andreas: 30-50 hours
You are a stupid lying Black person.
More polygons, bigger workforce. That's it. It's not that deep
Because modeling and animating higher graphical fidelity takes more time. The tools improve, but never enough to keep up with the increased details.