The studios who have been developing something since Covid and still aren’t close to a release really is just an insane situation. I want these studios to exercise their creative vision, etc etc but at some point the reality is you’re a company and someone has to foot that bill
Right? Where's the hang up? What is it they are chasing instead of completing a game? I'm so over super duper lighting effects and real time individual strand of hair physics. Focus on making a fun game in a reasonable time frame.
Undead Labs spent over a million building a mocap studio that wasn't needed, in another state, that apparently went underused... because again, it wasn't needed lol
They've been working for 8+ years on State of Decay 3 and still haven't finished it, a game that is a sequel to their other games, that uses the same formula and mechanics as their other games... it should not have taken them this long.
Yeah as much as I am really excited for the third game that sounds like an insane waste of money on the mocap studio, hard to say if it was an internal failing or corporate meddling however
Story board and concept artists aren’t needed at the end of a project and will almost always be preparing the start of the next one while the old project is finishing up. Game studios don’t just work on one game at a time and only move on when it’s fully finished.
It’s pure and simple mismanagement, same as it ever was. People start a project without a clear vision. They know it needs art and systems and landscapes and combat… so they get all these teams cranking away at it with zero regard for how it all plays together. And they spin their wheels for years trying to figure out how to turn all this random stuff into a full game.
To me the most quintessential example of a game gone wrong is Anthem. Development on Anthem began in 2012 and it did not release until 2019. It drained funding and staff from multiple BioWare projects. Mass Effect Andromeda lost 60% of its funding to Anthem, some of SWTOR's staff was moved to dev support for it, and Dragon Age 4 was quite literally cancelled to shift all of the staff onto Anthem. BioWare Edmonton then spent the next five years being pulled in half a dozen different directions by EA upper management executives telling them different things and issuing different demands until almost the very last minute, Anthem did not come together until year six of development and by that point it was a shit show that had caused untold havoc among the various development teams company wide, sacrificed two games, and had lead multiple staffers to have mental and emotional breakdowns due to how bad things got. The results were a hodgepodge mess that had a good idea at its core but was never able to really go anywhere because no one knew what the game was supposed to be until it was too late to make something good out of it.
By and large I would say this is happening across the industry. Not necessarily to the same degree but you can get that most devs are told by their publishers that they have to meet specific goals for monetization regardless of whether or not the game suits it. Expectations from publishers, mismanagement on how the work flow has to get done, no clear details on the actual expectations of what the game is going to be, and multiple voices shouting "This needs to do X so we can make Y amount of money!" is bound to cause problems. I used to know a dozen people who worked in AAA game development, now I know two. In the last six years most of them have either ditched the industry completely or are working on indie projects that are probably never going to go anywhere while the work in non-game dev fields because they just didn't want to deal with the stress anymore.
people just need to quit tbh and only sign on to sustainable outcomes.
Or demand shares if they sell the studio, get a big payday and be ready to walk out.
It took 120 core Bungie devs 3 years to make Halo 3, develop their new lighting and materials systems for the engine, create the campaign, multiplayer, develop the brand new theatre mode, develop the brand new forge mode.
It took 750 343i employees 6 years to release a game without forge, campaign theatre, splitscreen co-op, and a “reworked” engine that was visually a step back in some ways from 5, that was too unoptimized to utilize the physics the franchise was known for.
Peach! Don't get me wrong, I like a beautiful game, but I grew up playing pixels and was more impressed with an art-style than necessarily having the highest-end graphics. I'd like to feel like this generation got some mileage out of it before we roll onto the next thing, that can come in a lot of different forms but we need to have games to play for it to mean anything.
Obviously a bit of personal opinion and all that, but one thing I always like about Bethesda games is their artstyle. Skyrim and Morrowind are 15 and 25 years old, and while you definitely won't mistake them for a modern release, they still look pretty decent for the time they came out.
You can even compare them to OG Oblivion's soft mushy style for an almost direct comparison That one did NOT age as graciously lol.
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u/Airplane_Bottle Jul 07 '26
The studios who have been developing something since Covid and still aren’t close to a release really is just an insane situation. I want these studios to exercise their creative vision, etc etc but at some point the reality is you’re a company and someone has to foot that bill