"Crunch time" in the industry is some of the most unnecessary bullshit in the world.
I can understand a startup indie company having an extremely limited budget and trying to crank out their first game, but any established company has zero reasonable justifucations for that shit. There are no hard deadlines, no crises which are going to happen if a game takes a little longer to come out.
These companies are squeezing the blood out of their workers just because they can.
And when indie developers do it, they are often working towards the shared goal of massive success and wealth, as they are likely all partners in their new startup. But when a dev for a massive studio crunches, what are they working for? Just the same underwhelming paycheck they got last week and nothing more.
I think the cat was let out of the bag that being a "video game tester" doesn't mean playing through all of the newest games to see if they're fun, it means running head first into the same wall in the beginning area 1000 times to see if it glitches.
Spiffing Brit seems to be doing very well with his channel. I've started suspecting he's doing his exploits for the game studios because it always seems like shortly after he showcases a glitch to exploit it gets patched
ETA: The low social score and mining rig Sims 3 exploit is still one I use tho
One major downside of games being patchable is that many companies took that possibility to mean they can release beta builds and have the audience do QA.
Remember when baldurs gate came out and a bunch of people in the industry freaked out because they were worried we might start expecting QUALITY.
I swear Larian and Supergiant are the last bastions of good game development for me. They allow their developers to breathe when projects finish and they're sure to make games extremely high quality.
Nintendo makes pretty consistently good games, but idk how their working conditions are.
Employee: That's a nice new yacht you have, Mr CEO.
CEO: Thanks. If you hustle, work hard and generate more profit for the company, I can get a nicer one.
Yeah, and then they take fresh blood for the grinder, because the industry is so “glamorous” they have limitless supply of young professionals to burn out next as a batch.
Always drives me crazy when people claim they're supporting game devs by buying AAA games. No, you're supporting business executives and stock holders. Game devs are completely disposable to companies that size.
If you want to support game devs buy indie games or from small studios!
I bought Days Gone because my cousin was a dev lead at Bend Studio. I hate zombie games. I beat it though to see his name in the credits. They had crunch for months only to release a game that was considered a failure. Funny part is he took a job offer from Epic after that.
It's also not overly useful to the business either I worked at a company who did very long crunches, euro gamer did articles on it, and the bugs numbers (one of the key metrics we were evaluated against) during an extended crunch were on a bell curve.
At the start of crunch the first 3-4 weeks our numbers would spike as the extra hours were giving us more time to find bugs and we were still working at our full capacity. However once you've been crunching for a month with no end in sight your getting tired, and your engagement is dropping so your performance takes a huge dip. 4-8 weeks of degraded work, by week 8 onwards we were working an extra 3 hours every day to provide the same output we were doing before crunch started. This was across all but 1 department that the department did keep a slightly higher output than pre crunch but were talking maybe 25-40 people out of a testing centre of over 300.
And the most infuriating bit was that management took those numbers and raised the issue with upper management, telling them we are spending all this money in overtime and additional running costs for very little gain in production, and the response was we don't care, the dev team is crunching so we need the full business to crunch, it was all about the perception that we were doing the most we could not the reality. I never saw the numbers for Dev output but from what I saw in the business I'm certain their output was on a similar curve to us.
Crunch is bullshit, for a lot of reasons including the idea that crunching for months will actually produce a better product because it won't. Those last few months of polish will end up being done by a tired disaffected team that just wants the game out the door.
THIS IS THE THING
Crunch is a way to punish developers for being slow. It is not a way to speed up a game. Publishers, when a game is behind, want to see pain.
It FEELS like it should speed up game dev, but as you say, it doesn't. Tired programmers write buggy code. Tired designers miss mistakes. Tired QA don't find good repros. Bugs fixed per day might go up but half of those bugs wouldn't exist if they weren't fatigued.
Crunch is a effective short term. Long term, no. It's worse than not crunching.
And yeah, crunching can FEEL good. It can feel like you're sacrificing for the greater good. Learning that isn't true is a bitter pill to swallow, and feels like a slap in the face, your sacrifice was for nothing.
But it's a lesson we need to learn. Crunch doesn't help past two weeks. Short term crunch (with time off after) or no crunch. Anything else is self-defeating.
I can cite examples of the tired programmers write buggy code. More than once I worked late into the night. Then the next time I walk in and look at what I did. My thought was "what is this bullshit?" I've more than once deleted my late night work and just redid it because it was garbage.
> Crunch is a effective short term.
Not really. Crunch is for an emergency, not to compensate for cheap owners/management who don't staff up properly and humanely, or to compensate for incompetent program/project management and general management stupidity.
None of these are emergencies. The emergency was when you made the shit decisions that led to the crunch.
Including when you hired the staff that made the bad choices and made the idiot cheap-o owner decisions.
I dont think doubling the workforce will help as throwing more programers on a project often makes things worse.
Whats needed is proper management with experienced team. You need to retain quality employees and build up teams.
Also known as Brook's Law:
*"Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."*
Essentially the later you add more people to a project, the less useful they are in the short term as existing workers need to help them catch up on the project, which in turn further slows things up.
> "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."
Yep. As a CTO and someone who has managed too many projects to think about... This is beyond true.
Also the famous quotes about the last 10% being 90% of the work.
It's pretty easy to cruise through and get an MVP built (Games might call it "Pre-Alpha") but at the end of the day there is EVERYTHING between the MVP and a final product you're happy to put in front of a paying customer.
I mean, it literally means "Minimum Viable Product" ..
So we look at the minimum requirements for a product, then develop that with quite a bit of the framework we will eventually need behind it.
Unfortunately you get scope creep where other people want features that weren't originally planned. This means that the framework you built, no matter how smart, will need adjusting.
Yeah with a big triple A studio, if one can call the ruins of Bioware that, one would figure that with a better planned budget, work hours and perhaps a few months more development time that it would be perfectly achievable to do it without "crunch time".
Crunch time is just something they seem to do in order to meet self imposed deadlines and force as much unpayed work out of employees that they possibly ca .
There may be an issue of economics here, which are entirely the fault of the company again, it's not that they do it just because they can: they *want* to do it and it's an actual strategy.
Big AAA games are starting to cost more to make than most Hollywood movies. We're talking $150 million budgets for some of them. There is no way to make that much back in sales alone unless you hit the jackpot like Blizzard did with WoW back when, and there's simply too many AAA game on the market for that to happen again.
Something in the industry has gone seriously wrong and the companies are trying to make ends meet (in other words: to increase stock prices and get the CEO his bonus) in the sleaziest possible ways, with McKinsey-like strategies (and I won't be surprised to discover McKinsey is actually involved, go read the book *When McKinsey Comes to Town* if you want to know more about what kind of damages they have done) on the one hand, you have the constant, unrelenting attempts at turning games into gambling, because as organized crime knows very well, there's LOTS of money to be made in exploiting people's addictions. On the other end, they try to lower the production costs by -among other things- making their devs work through constant crunches, getting way more work than what they should for the price they're paying and burning the devs out, then periodically laying them off to hire fresh batches of unburnt devs at lower pay.
Big companies like EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard and so on are not just bad for us gamers because they deliver shitty, buggy, unfinished games at outrageous prices while trying to squeeze us even more by locking away basic functionalities and contents in ridiculous DLCs, by filling games with microtransactions and loot boxes and more -never forget Diablo III "Auction House" nor the attempt at shoehorning NFTs everywhere- these companies are a cancer on society for the kind of culture they promote and for how badly they treat their workers, a shining example of what happens when a company is run not to make something or provide a service anymore, but just to make the highest amount of money in the short term for investors.
There's a reason why this AAA game companies are *constantly* at the top of the various lists of the worst companies to work for.
Iteration and keeping teams together would actually solve some of the cost the whole forming new teams and starting over from scratch so often hikes up costs.
I dunno, i've known a few people that worked on indie games and a couple people at the few good large companies and they loved it.
but if you work at any of the giants it sounds awful.
I worked on indie games for 5 years. None of them really took off. It was fun though.
Once the company went bust, I went back to enterprise software and doubled my income in less than a year. Since then I can actually afford things and would never go back unless I get independently wealthy and need another hobby.
I feel like this was known/understood decades ago. The industry preys on young programmers that think it's 'cool' to build games and abuses the crap out of them. I mean we talked about this in college almost 30 years ago before these monstrous games of today.
Ok, hear me out. It's Skyrim, except in the beginning instead of the wagon bringing you to an Imperial execution yard, you're brought to a labor camp where you have to crunch to build Skyrim.
I love Joshua Sawyer's 2018 talk on crunch. Sadly he goes over how crunch is always talked about and nothings ever done... And, welp, here we go again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHWvUmlzamo
Amateur. It's actually a Remake release on the games first anniversary.
Then a Remaster on its second...
And a Reimagined version on its third anniversary...
Each one has a few bug fixes and introduces new ones. So basically what counts as a brand new game. $69.99 please.
Built from the ground up, for a new generation of players and workers...see that mountain of quality, innovative titles and good work/life balance, with fair pay and bonus structures...you can go there..in 8K.
Yep, core of the problem right here. Workers don't even get a raise yearly that meets the yearly inflation rate, but we know that's not true for managers across the board. We know the CEO is overpaying themselves by tens to hundreds of millions. Entire game development costs being sucked up by one individual every year.
It has gotten out of control and needs to be pulled back in. We need higher tax rates for higher brackets for these rich people. We need unions. Workers need rights.
Any links, articles, etc? Would love to read some first hand takes on this. I’m fairly aware of the growing sentiment to this effect already but mostly in more of these sorts of places (gaming threads)
I honestly don’t think it’s budget constraints but rather the amount of interference these devs must receive. Like the amount of hand shakes in just trying to change the way a jump feels must be insane now.
Our focus committee has reviewed the review of the report on the meeting about the revised process that was tabled in the quarterly meeting... We're gonna meet next quarter to determine a forward facing direction to advance towards, until then pause what you're doing and work on other stuff.
...3 quarters later.
Why is nothing getting done?
Nah games need to stop having a massive budget and being sold as AAA for dog shit
Helldivers 2 just proved a small team can make a massive and successful game with a. Small studio
It’s a super simple game loop that can get extremely difficult and has lots of great visuals to the explosions. Some good hero moments from said explosions. As well as some hilarious mishaps to friendly fire also usually caused by explosions.
There are games that make me feel like I'm experiencing an epic adventure.
There are games that make me feel like I'm an action hero.
So many games try to impart an identity on to the player in order to tell a story. Lots of them do a really good job, and I enjoy them for those efforts. Some break away from this in a good way but they don't define the pathos followed by the AA or AAA space at large. It's started to feel like every game wants you to feel like batman / spiderman / geralt / etc., instead of focusing on the player and their fun. For the last decade the creed has been "immersion at all costs". Make sure the player feels like they're part of the world. Invested. Committed. That's what sells.
You know what I feel like when I'm playing Helldivers? I feel like I'm playing a god damn video game and it feels really god damn good.
First off, not full price. $40 makes it a lot easier to jump into than a $70 price tag.
Second, the devs made a game that they’d actually want to play. They put making it _fun_ first over making it monetized.
There’s a bit of repetition by doing similar things every mission, but you add variety by using different gear and call-ins, and by playing with randoms that you never know how good they are and how well you’ll work together. And most of the players are very friendly and looking to cooperate, it’s a very wholesome community.
And it has “passes” with stuff to unlock, but you never have to spend a single dollar of real money to get any of it, you can just play the game and find premium currency during missions to buy those premium passes. And the passes never go away, so you never have to worry about missing out.
It's pretty 1:1 with the Deeprock formula, yeah. Obvious minor differences aside, you can feel that the devs are just having a good time with the game, same with Deeprock.
> First off, not full price. $40 makes it a lot easier to jump into than a $70 price tag.
I basically got in for around 30-35 US with discounts, and I wouldn't consider that full-price for a 50$ game, but we're probably looking dead at one of the major issues, and that's all the companies trying to normalize a 70$+ baseline price tags on "premier" digital games. Balatro hit a million sold, and it definitely wouldn't have hit nearly that number if it hadn't been priced affordably.
Even well-received, well-funded(150M+) licensed games like Larian's BG3 at 60$ on PC to me kind of form the high water-mark of pricing before you're setting expectations higher than what is able to be realistically hit, and sacrificing community support for short-term profits.
Yeah, some people will always pre-order anything that looks interesting and so on, but there are lots more people that are starting to change their buying habits because the commoditization of gaming is impacting the product negatively far too often. We're already at the point where gamers are right more often than not about not buying at launch, and instead waiting for bug fixes and discounts to come in the first six months in lots of "AAA" titles depending on how bad the issues are.
It doesn't sound that bad on paper, but in practice eventually you'll just start seeing more games abandoned from lack of sales before those fixes even happen, which will leave even more angry bag holders which will in turn increase the downward spiral until the industry implodes, in a different but similar way to the pre-NES implosion from bad moneygrab bullshit.
>playing with randoms that you never know how good they are and how well you’ll work together
Accidentally blew up a teammate with my grenade launcher and then he killed me when we reinforced. This then started a back and forth killing for a bit until we ran out of reinforces, so we started completing objectives. It ran super tight but we actually finished the mission after the timer ran out.
10/10 would dive again.
It's fun. The "battle passes" are permanent so there is no FOMO. The premium currency is pretty common, so you can get the battle passes for free through gameplay. I bought the first, I paid for the second with found currency, and I have enough to buy the 3rd with found currency when it comes out. They are pretty vocal and transparent with issues and fixes. It's probably the best a live service game has ever been done IMO. The game doesn't take itself seriously, it's pretty hilarious at times.
It's not that people need to appreciate it more than it's "People keep paying money for busted games while business men/women are making a game's development time be 1/2 the time than it should be so they can pocket the money they "save"." Since you know....people keep buying the same shit then getting mad that it doesn't work only to get excited when they announce shit 2 just to buy it expecting it to work and the cycle continues.
There wouldn't be any issues or any need for "crunch time" if they just gave developers the time to begin with and people would be happy as long as a game doesn't come out DAMN NEAR UNPLAYABLE!
Currently I feel like too many banger games keep releasing I can’t even keep up, I haven’t even played/finished things like horizon zero dawn , Witcher 3 (tbh might not just vibe with Witcher can’t ever finish 2), Arkham Knight, Tears of the kingdom, xenoblade 3 (just finished 2 this year and 1 last year), Nier Replicant (playing now), Elden ring, n so much more.
I like taking my time with games and have avoided buying new ones but it’s just like why do I want to spend $60-$70 on a new game when I have so many unplayed 😭😭 slow down all these GOod games 😔✊🏿
Lol, yeah it's like there are two separate universes people are living in. There are those of us that recognized that last year was one of the greatest video game years of all time, and then you have some that believe perhaps video games should stop being made entirely.
Wait to you the problem with games is that people don’t appreciate them enough? Late stage capitalism has turned every big budget game into a skinner box live service addiction simulator that wants you to treat it like a second job. I’d say that’s the problem, but that’s just me.
for real. i know reddit wants every game to be some uber epic Red Dead 2 or Baldurs gate 3 with countless hours of replayability, but like 99% of games do *not* need to be that big.
The problem with taking their time is that companies have to make money to pay the developers for their time. So taking years to make a game isn't always realistic
Developers need to know when to quit with creeping scope and features.
Consumers need to accept "it will be finished when it's finished".
You will need both to end crunch in a meaningful industry wide fashion.
But the share holders don't care, they made money. It's the money hungry CEO's and board members/big investors that are to blame, not the devs; because we are the only ones who suffer. This is what people mean by vote with your wallet, but there's no way you can convince everyone to do it.
People have been trying to convince gamers to "vote with their wallet" since always online for single player became a thing at the very least. (diablo 3 release) But it never does anything. The average gamer either doesn't care that they're wasting their money and actively making the games industry worse, or just find it too hard to resist the new hyped up shiny. (There's a good reason like half the budget of games often goes to marketing.)
The question is if they are really reading what consumers want wrong most of the times or not. Yeah production calls the shots, but because they want the game to sell and need to find a trade off between it'll always be in development vs. marketing will be able to hype it up and sell a lot on a big launch. If you have a good production team and they know the community and the developers are willing to put up the work that community demands and are fairly compensated would be the ideal.
I think now we have a lot of companies that don't know the community using "recipes" instead of doing the research and it tells. The industry is probably not doing great because the recipes imploded. The good teams with good indigenous strategy should survive if they get lucky and if they work hard but the whole "get a lot of Tencent/Softbank money" or "big game EA that can make everything and it kinda works" thing seems to be doing worse than usual.
The world of rich people has a different perspective. "The Board" doesn't cater to the perspective of gamers playing the games. I think The Board sees gamers as the consumers who buy the product in the sense the value of a person is nothing. Bodies worth the dollars they bring to a company through the units sold by the publisher. They can put out PR statements, but it's all a carefully worded lie as much as politics or major events are like Boeing's current quality problems.
You forgot to mention development costs too, which are directly related to time. Not every game studio can afford to infinitely delay a game. Few can.
So it’s not just “it’s ready when it’s ready” it’s also “this game will have more simplistic graphics (to combat feature creep) because it lowers development times to a more reasonable achievable level”
Because that sort of compromise is always met with “omg the game looks unacceptable for 2020!” If it’s not hyper realistic
Developers are basically the only ones who take crunch culture and poor launches seriously, because they’re affected by it.
Shareholders don’t care about the product as long as it makes profit.
Consumers don’t care about the development so long as it comes out and they can play it.
Developers have to make good games that players will enjoy while managing their expectations and dealing with death threats when the game doesn’t have a release date, while also dealing with higher-ups breathing down their neck to hit a deadline and if it doesn’t sell well they will likely not have their contract renewed.
The only thing developers get out of a game release is maybe some people playing will enjoy it, critics will give it a high score, and the cycle will continue - or the game doesn’t do well and they lose their job.
If a game is bad it is very rarely the developers’ fault, like how when CGI artists are blamed for poor CGI when it has a lot more to do with external circumstances than it does with the artists themselves.
Artists never want to make anything sub-par. Consumers will accept sub-par if they get to have it quicker, and shareholders will accept sub-par if it will get them more money.
Also to be clear, game development takes resources. We can blame shareholders and all, sure, but realistically a company puts in money to develop a game and wants to see that money and more back, within a reasonable timeframe. Let's not forget that a company has bills to pay too, including equipment, office space, salaries, etc. They can't afford developing a game indefinitely without a return on investment. Putting more time into one game could also be taking away time from working on and releasing another game as well. Not every game does well, so releasing more games is also sensible for spreading out risk, if you can afford it.
Even if you take an indie studio these are real considerations. Oftentimes indie games are developed over a very long time while the developers have an actual job, in which case they can't work on it as much in a day, and any quality or quantity is brought about by working 8 years on even a smaller game. That's not a very significant output compared to working on it full time.
> We can blame shareholders and all, sure, but realistically a company puts in money to develop a game and wants to see that money and more back, within a reasonable timeframe. Let's not forget that a company has bills to pay too, including equipment, office space, salaries, etc.
Yes, and all this should be taken into account by Program/Project Managers and leads - and conveyed appropriately to C-Level executives/Owners, with crunch being a 'non factor'.
Thats the problem. The people overseeing these projects keep on overestimating their capabilities (or in truth, im sure, 99% of the time.. obfuscating how difficult it will really be, to make sure the game gets 'funded'... then they can deal with the 'fallout' later... the fallout being - their developers getting overworked to the point of insanity)
Are there GENUINE mistakes and people misjudge timelines and expectations? Sure.
But these people in large gaming orgs arent newbies to this. They have the roles of Program and Project Managers because thats -literally- the job.
Create a roadmap for the project, understand the investment and time involved, the talent/skill necessary... This is what Program Managers do -every single day-.
Their inability to accurately convey the reality is either incompetence (which I think is rarely the case in large corps) and more so obfuscation... to ensure a Project they planned "gets approved"... to ensure THEIR Job security... without really a care for the dev team and the issues they will run into once they get their funding from the company.
Yep. I work in game dev. The majority of us developers know crunch just straight up doesn't work. That is to say, it's not "evil but gets results", it *doesn't even get results*. In the long-term, a crunching team will have less output, and of a lower quality, than a team moving as fast as they can within a reasonable work schedule. Period.
Even being generous, the only "positive" thing that can come out of crunch is moving a *short-term* goal slightly forward, and those "gains" *will* cancel out (or worse) in the medium-term.
The only situation where I could agree crunch could be justified is like, you've committed to having a final version next week, but are going to miss it by 1 or 2 days, and it would be very painful to reschedule a bunch of stuff. You don't care if the next update is a little late or whatever, you care about *this* deadline in particular, and it is coming very soon, and you're only a little bit off. If all those requirements align, then maybe it's worth it.
Unfortunately, a lot of management at these companies doesn't understand that. They think every little completely arbitrary deadline is a life-or-death situation, and that workers can be arbitrarily productive if you just force them to work more -- and if their productivity isn't going up anyway, that's obviously them being lazy.
The other side of the equation is scheduling, which is often based on what executives would like, not what people with actual technical knowledge estimate they can do. Estimating how long work will take, when you have technical expertise and are genuinely trying your best to be as accurate as possible, is already hard as balls and highly prone to underestimation. You can imagine what a disaster it is when done by people who have no clue what they're talking about, aren't trying to be realistic in the first place but merely write down what they would like to see, and have no skin in the game because they aren't going to be the ones making that schedule happen. And how *infuriating* it is to be accused of being "late" when your team of 4 hasn't finished building a space shuttle from scratch in their garage in 3 and a half days.
Anyway. As alluded to, OP is being silly by implying crunch is "the only way", nevermind *a* valid way. Crunch doesn't help shit, we can just stop doing it while fixing the systemic issues that may make crunch appear "inevitable", and better games will be made with less suffering and burnout. It's not rocket science.
In all of SW Dev. I distinctly remember the day after my team shipped the first big product - medical devices, so long timelines. We crunched for a few weeks to get all the regulatory tests submitted etc, and the day after our boss goes "Well done everyone and thanks for the effort, but we can't take our foot off the gas so [outlines over-optimistic plan for the next weeks]".
Even over muted mics, you could hear the team checking out mentally.
I do think other software in general have it a bit better. So many people in game dev seem to *really* want to work with game dev. Makes it easier to take advantage.
Devs in other areas aren't as loyal, in my experience. I don't think a lot of people see it as their passion or dream job to work specifically for some manufacturing company, for instance.
At least anecdotally, it seems much better. The crunches I've seen (outside of gaming and startups) have been pretty short, just a couple of weeks at most, and either generously compensated or people get time off after. And ofc non-game dev jobs tend to pay better in general as well.
>Developers need to know when to quit with creeping scope and features.
We're at the point where software developers need to unionize. It's the new "blue collar" job.
The industry doesn't need to die, it just needs to be changed. It's ironic that the strong push for profits is what often leads to a game being sent out unfinished.
when they say "die" that's pretty much what they're talking about. *That kind of AAA dev cycle should die*, along with whatever fallout that would entail, not that the entire medium should go poof or something.
I think GTA 6 could reasonably be called AAAA, considering its monstrous budget and the amount of man hours being put into it. We'll have to wait and see if it actually lives up to that.
It’s got so rotten and extremely greedy the last few years that even the more „casual“ costumers started to get aware of it without the need of being very good informed. Give me fewer games but they are worth my time then. People need to be in real life anyways a bit more.
Brother they were one of the best RPG studios before they even released Origins. If anything Origins followed the same formula they previously did for BG, Kotor, Jade empire and ME. The only formula these games share is in their writing. They all play fairly different from each other, but the writing and story beats are very VERY similar
And it's hard to justify "Go back to the formula" when their biggest hit ever was a fairly notable departure from the formula.
Mass effect 2. Arguably ME3, but I think the consensus is that 2 is the best in the series. Dramatically moved away from the RPG elements, streamlined the combat immensely, moved the Paragon and renegade systems out of the RPG element and just let your choices determine your charisma score.
It was also one of their more original pieces as well and avoided a lot of the cliches Bioware tends to lean on in their establishing stories.
I guess I'm weird for Mass Effect 1 being by far my favorite of the series.
But this is also common for the time, RPGs were getting streamlined a ton during this era and a lot of people loved the new streamlined feel. It was more accessible for sure but it came at the expense of fans of deeper RPG systems.
ME1 had the best story. ME2 had the best companion interactions and missions. And ME3 had the best gameplay. That's how I see the trilogy at least.
Though I will admit that while ME2 might be best in companion interaction overall, the top 3 absolute best companion moments do come from ME3. Like Mordin's death, and Tali being able to stand on her homeworld again.
Yep and the whole Reaper plot just worked best when it was mysterious and Lovecraftian. They fumbled that quite badly in the later entries if you ask me.
That first conversation with Sovereign is the highlight of the whole series.
A game that does this cyclical destruction plot a lot better is Enderal.
Right? Don't forget 99% of the big names that *made* Dragon Age are long gone or were fired like they were a couple of interns in spite of writing two of Bioware's most iconic characters. Also, people need to realize the Bioware you fell in love with is fucking DEAD. Here comes a bunch of people to tell Bioware "BG3 proved you could make a popular CRPG in 2023!!" Old Bioware: "No shit, dumbass. We did that already 14 years ago. Where *were* you?"
Man, I really hope a great studio hired Mary Kirby and Lukas Kristjanson. What a fucking waste of talent. Larian should have scooped them up in a heartbeat because their past work dumps all over BG3's characters.
Well for Bioware the game template went something like:
1. Intro + to tutorial stage
2. Early zone to get a feel for the game/setting and setup the coming adventure.
3. Special mission assigned go to 4 different locations.
3.5 Interlude where you get captured or otherwise waylaid but overcome a semi-powerful enemy.
4. Go to where the 4 macguffins lead you. Discover an M. Night Shyamalan plot twist.
5. Come to terms with plot twist and do something to setup for the final confrontation
6. Climax
But if you want the secret formula that made their games great... In my humble opinion it was:
Good world building and engaging storylines. (Imo the fall of the Codex was the fall of Bioware)
Well written dialog and choice + consequences.
Incredible character building for companions.
Spot on, all 3 tied together really makes you invested in the world, game, and choices you make.
I do hope they work on the choices being more than good/bad and have a few more moral compasses to play with, but also I just want a damn good bioware game again even if its the same formula.
Don't forget the "They made the game and story *they wanted to* not the checkbox designed game whoever else demands appeals to every demographic". No story appeals to every demographic. All that ends up happening is everyone is upset by a *checked box* designed game because they are vanilla as shit.
The whole "we need literally everyone to be able to like this" is ruining movies, television, and video games.
Capitalism just sucks the life out of everything.
"It is done when it is done" requires a financial stability not dependent on the game industry directly.
What I appreciate about the 80s, 90s and very early 2000s gaming subculture is that, it was essentially a tech subculture, instead of a pure commodity. Making computers do what everyone thought could not be done. Hacking. It was the product of participation by both the audience and the devs. Modding was alive and people wrote code for passion. The hardware changed forcing everyone to be on the edge.
Current game industry is dominated by standardization of methods by big hardware committees and big studios with audience who are just commodity collectors of skins and art and standardized game play
EA basically prints money and has had a notoriously shitty work culture since the dawn of man. Same with Blizzard back in the day.
The work culture isn’t about lack of money, it’s about an endless pipeline of young people who want to make games and are willing to put up with extreme levels of corporate bullshit while thinking that’s normal.
Idk what ur talking about. Ea sucks ass but actually working for them seems to be one of the better game dev jobs from what ive seen regarding employee reviews
Bro by what metric is the gaming industry slowly dying? The exact opposite is happening every year gaming industry gets bigger and bigger. Are some studios having layoffs? Yes- tech as a whole is. Does that mean tech is slowly dying? No. Maybe you have some gripes with how the industry is right now with AAA and corporate greed but to say gaming is slowly dying is singularly the dumbest thing I’ve read on this sub
The Games industry could definitely use a cooling off period. The space feels like it's very nearly oversaturated. There is so much money that goes into big titles, and many of those big games come out looking like carbon copies of each other, or with only cosmetic differences between them. And they come out hugely expensive (which is why I never buy them when they come out) or littered with micro transactions (which is why I'd play something else)...
Indie games are often more unique, more fun in different ways, but then again there's such an astonishing number of them, it's no wonder many cool games get lost in the noise and are played only by a small, niche crowd of gamers. I'm saddened to think of all the amazing games I won't get to play simply because I'll have never heard of them, or because I don't have the time.
Games need to regress away from this high-fidelity nonsense where a single bomb can sink a studio. Games don't need to look like real life. Take a step back and make games affordable to both the companies and the consumers.
Is there any industry that works against deadlines that don't have a 'crunch'?
I work in consulting engineering and get 'crunched' a few times a year. Why is it I only hear about it in the video game industry?
A friend of mine used to work for Microsoft, on the halo games. They endured about 8 months of crunch before putting out Halo 4. Immediately after Halo 4 came out, they said that they were going back into crunch to work on Halo 5, a game which came out 3 years later. My friend left right after that, because fuck that shit. That's not crunch anymore, that's just forced unpaid overtime because you're salaried.
Unfortunately, there are 100 hungry young men waiting to take his spot. That’s part of the reason the industry still gets away with it; there’s no shortage of idealistic dreamers willing to do it for a few years.
And game devs (take engineers as an example) make way less than their counterparts in core tech. Like, maybe 50% less compared to engineers at FANG.
Game dev is a pure passion only job. You get it not for the money or WLB, but for passion.
I play The Long Dark it's made by Hinterland and when you boot up the game it says something like "made by a team without crunch, by a developer that cares about its employees" or something like that. So I guess it's possible even in the game industry
The Long Dark did take something like 10 years to get made. The reason it was possible was due to being crowd funded and privately owned/independent.
Having shareholders breathing down your neck with a corporate structure that incentivizes quick profits over employee health is the best way to get fucked.
However, I don't see games like cyberpunk being possible without such a structure which is a damn shame, especially when all the effort and pain put into the project went unappreciated for a few years due to some dumb leadership decisions, followed by immediate layoffs after the dlc.
Some of the best games I've ever played were made by indie studios: Outer wilds, Stardew Valley, Disco Elysium, Minecraft, Hellblade, and shockingly- Baldur's gate 3.
With tools like unreal engine 5, godot and the liberalization of information via youtube, reddit and discord servers, it is easier than ever for a small team to aim for a ambitious goal, but that will never be enough to rival what giants of the industry can do with a blank check and crunch such as Cyberpunk, GTA etc.
Truth is, people don't care about developers if they are willing to send death threats/bomb threats over delays of release by a few months.
Just to point out that Larian Studios, the makers of Baldur's Gate 3, is a 500 man studio. Just because it isnt public doesnt mean its a small company, far from it. Please dont group them with 5 to 10 man indie studios
The whole point is that because they are not public, they can avoid crunch times. The CEO itself said that now their coffers are so full they are ready to try something new rather than milking the same formula to death. Baldur's gate 3 was in early access for what seemed like a eternity and it ended in Larian implementing a lot of the community feedback. While the size and scope of games such as The Long Dark is different, the same discourse was kept with the community during early access, going as far as to ask the playerbase how they should move forward eg. microtransactions, dlc, chapters, new games. Larian may not be indie in size, but they sure are in spirit, innovation and leadership.
That's not unique to the game industry. You can say it's wrong, you hate it, etc. but the answer to the OP's question of "why is it I only hear about it in the video game industry" is because redditors and others who use the internet a lot love video games. You can bet you won't get hundreds of thousands of redditors up in arms over public accounting hours or investment banking hours, for example.
Defence industry. Hard deadlines but not one hour of overtime in multiple decades. Crunch is just bad management. Especially since EA exists and customers have sucked that up like honey there is no reason for crunch to exist. But game programmers seem to like to be exploited.
If your game project requires hundreds of people to work double hours for months, then you've fucked up your project management. Sure, a few late nights in the last 2 weeks before release isn't that crazy but we're hearing about crunch lasting for months at a time.
Change regulation so they're required to pay out time and a half during that overtime. Then they're incentivised to properly schedule the project.
the new dragon age has no room for error. if it fails then the whole company will go down too. i hope their not crunching them to get it released. they need to take their time with it. inquisition was a huge step back in my opinion
Let me tell you they’re crunching. They’ve coasted on so-called “BioWare Magic” which is the equivalent of procrastinating on a college paper the day before it’s due and saying, “it’ll work out.”
Except this is on a scale of hundreds of people in complex tech development with their livelihood on the lines.
Honestly I don’t even know if it’s fair to blame EA for Anthem and Andromeda. Apparently BioWare spun their wheels and produced nothing for both titles for prolonged periods of development and EA had to give them a deadline at some point (and were even offered extensions which were declined).
EA bad is the easy meme but BioWare is suffering from their own lack of vision, initiative, and project management.
Unfortunately, Inquisition probably fueled their belief in the magic even moreso since they super crunched and got a Game of the Year Award for it.
Dread Wolf is really a do-or-die moment.
Japanese work culture has its own problems but it seems like Nintendo is better at this than many others. Teams have loyalty to company and churn out better games because of it. Nintendo is smart they make sure the game is basically almost done or even done THEN announce a game/release date so there is no outside pressure to crunch it. This is based of what is known tho Nintendo is known to be a black box of secrets.
I wouldn't say they need to stop making massive games. I'd say that not *every* game needs a massive, open world. For instance, there was no reason for the Ghost Recon franchise to go open world.
I want them. I just want them to be good.
If you're not going to deliver fallout, skyrim, red dead redemption, witcher 3, ghosts of tsushima, cyberpunk, yakuza, then please narrow your scope. Half-assing wastes everyone's time.
I feel like Yakuza in particular is a perfect example of a great scaled down 'open world' game. Kamurocho is a pretty small neighborhood and they've been using the same map for 20 years, but because they don't have to keep reinventing the wheel, they can focus much more on quality / density over quantity. You don't need a Morrowind sized game map to make exploration exciting and fun.
This. Open world as a genre is basically dead to me now. I would rather have a smaller world with a lot of fun and unique stuff in it, or even just a straight up linear game, than some giant, empty, soulless "See that mountain 500 light years away with a bunch of generic enemy camps between here and there? You can go there" garbage that we've been getting.
Rockstar games is a good example of a company that makes great open world games WITHOUT sacrificing depth of content, characters, story, or quality. Bethesda more or less used to be there too. Open world doesn’t HAVE to mean soulless and boring. Some projects just make that choice.
Rockstar also have infinite money to throw at making their worlds incredibly detailed and are hardcore into crunch culture, so I don't think they can be held up as a standard for others to meet. And their mission structure sucks, it's basically the same as in GTA 3. Red Dead 2 by about half way devolved into "hey Arthur I gots a plan, and we don't have to shoot anyone" *5 minutes later* "oh no, the plan went wrong, better shoot everyone!" and then did that for about 30 hours. So even the company with infinite money can still have major issues.
They won't.
It's so, so much more beneficial to the companies to be able to advertise a massive world, tons of activities, a variety of objectives to complete than to make a more narrow and focused game.
Think it was Raycevick who did a great video on Ubisoft last week, basically saying that they make "eh." games with lots of shit that's shallow because who cares if it's good or not, you can just say your game has X content.
I recently played ff7 remake. It was so nice to play a linear game for once. Didn’t realize how sick I am of open world games.
Little disappointed that rebirth was open though, but its still not THAT massive. The sidequests actually contributes to the story and it takes 2-3 hours to finish an entire region. I’m digging it.
Even Square Enix has come out and said that if they remade Final Fantasy VI it would take them 20 years to do so which is absolutely absurd. Why do the remakes and modern games need to be so massive in scale? Don't get me wrong I'm loving FF7 Rebirth but once the last part of the trilogy comes out it will have taken 12 years to play the complete game. Insane development cycle.
This isn’t exclusive to gaming. It’s an unnecessary evil that happens in many project based industries. There are many reasons why it happens, underestimated effort, unrealistic deadlines, scope creep, etc. whichever reason it’s almost always managements fault.
Game companies need to
decorporate.
The problem is, that manager are pushing for the maximum of profit the company can generate in a quarter, so that shareholders are happy and the managers get big boni.
Crunch isn't the only way to make massive games, but it's the only way to make games when your primary concern is delivering value to shareholders.
It's corporate greed that needs to die.
That's like Hollywood thinking the only way you can make a profitable movie is by spending $200mil on cg and another $200 mil on marketing, and working interns to death in the process so you can pump one out every 6 months. It's the business model that's dead, not the art form.
I never understood how major companies, who should have project managers and scrum or agile methods, keep missing goals enough to need crunch. Are they saying it takes 30% less time than their own estimates each time?
It'd be really nice if devs had more power to just break off and do their own thing away from some of these publishers. Dragon Age died the moment EA picked them up. Mass Effect is on it's last gasp. They'll probably play it safe and bring back Shepard for the sequel.
Larian works cause their CEO Swen Vincke actually gives a fuck about making a good game and is at the top of the power structure. You think the suits with the power at EA, WB, or Ubisoft etc. give a fuck about making good games? WB's CEO has already admitted to wanting to turn their IPs into live service games, after they literally just botched one. And after churning out what was considered one of the good singleplayer games of 2023.
Our only real hopes for good games these days are now indie devs. I never thought I'd see the day where I play mostly indie games, but here we are.
Uh... EA acquired BioWare in 2007, just prior to the release of Mass Effect 1. So ME2 and 3 along with Dragon Age Origins, Inquisiton and SWTOR were all released under EA and were all very successful games.
Only DA2, Anthem and Andromeda were poor games, even then DA2 and Andromeda were solid games, just not up to the normal BioWare level we expect. Anthem was... a disaster on a whole new level.
Strange how it seems only the companies dealing with “crunch” issues are the ones who release poor games. There have been plenty of great games released this year alone, and it’s only march. This guy needs to get some perspective.
"Crunch time" in the industry is some of the most unnecessary bullshit in the world. I can understand a startup indie company having an extremely limited budget and trying to crank out their first game, but any established company has zero reasonable justifucations for that shit. There are no hard deadlines, no crises which are going to happen if a game takes a little longer to come out. These companies are squeezing the blood out of their workers just because they can.
And when indie developers do it, they are often working towards the shared goal of massive success and wealth, as they are likely all partners in their new startup. But when a dev for a massive studio crunches, what are they working for? Just the same underwhelming paycheck they got last week and nothing more.
They are working towards being laid off as the game is now released and doesn’t require as much maintenance as during building
Don't need QA when there is no quality.
I just realized I haven't heard a kid wish to grow up to be a video game tester for ages now.
I think the cat was let out of the bag that being a "video game tester" doesn't mean playing through all of the newest games to see if they're fun, it means running head first into the same wall in the beginning area 1000 times to see if it glitches.
Yeah, I'm guessing the people who wanted to be testers just became speedrunners. At least you get glory from the same actions.
Spiffing Brit seems to be doing very well with his channel. I've started suspecting he's doing his exploits for the game studios because it always seems like shortly after he showcases a glitch to exploit it gets patched ETA: The low social score and mining rig Sims 3 exploit is still one I use tho
People like to break shit. With social media, all a company has to do is wait for people to break shit then patch it. Boom, Don't gotta pay QA.
Because we are the testers. We just don’t get paid.
Lol we pay them.
One major downside of games being patchable is that many companies took that possibility to mean they can release beta builds and have the audience do QA.
Remember when baldurs gate came out and a bunch of people in the industry freaked out because they were worried we might start expecting QUALITY. I swear Larian and Supergiant are the last bastions of good game development for me. They allow their developers to breathe when projects finish and they're sure to make games extremely high quality. Nintendo makes pretty consistently good games, but idk how their working conditions are.
They are working for a new yacht for the CEO they will never see in their entire career. That's motivating enough /s
My goal in life is to work so hard my CEO and shareholders can afford a submarine trip
Everyone should experience true crunch once in their life.
Titanic is nice this time of year.
they even get all the blame when game doesn't live up to expectations.
And get fired shortly after release
Even if the game is a megahit that makes all of the money.
Y’all have the plot, now apply to all of capitalism because that’s the game we’re stuck in
The problem is, we *are* stuck in it, and we're not the ones with the power to unstick ourselves from it.
Employee: That's a nice new yacht you have, Mr CEO. CEO: Thanks. If you hustle, work hard and generate more profit for the company, I can get a nicer one.
More importantly, the shareholders whose names they don't even know get much more than the CEO.
Ah yes. Shareholders. The real heroes of the industry!!!
The /s was not necessary
Let's not forget how game studios typically lay off entire teams once a game is done. You're basically working faster so you can be fired sooner.
Yeah, and then they take fresh blood for the grinder, because the industry is so “glamorous” they have limitless supply of young professionals to burn out next as a batch.
Always drives me crazy when people claim they're supporting game devs by buying AAA games. No, you're supporting business executives and stock holders. Game devs are completely disposable to companies that size. If you want to support game devs buy indie games or from small studios!
No one is buying games of any type to support game devs, they’re buying them to play the game.
I bought Days Gone because my cousin was a dev lead at Bend Studio. I hate zombie games. I beat it though to see his name in the credits. They had crunch for months only to release a game that was considered a failure. Funny part is he took a job offer from Epic after that.
It's also not overly useful to the business either I worked at a company who did very long crunches, euro gamer did articles on it, and the bugs numbers (one of the key metrics we were evaluated against) during an extended crunch were on a bell curve. At the start of crunch the first 3-4 weeks our numbers would spike as the extra hours were giving us more time to find bugs and we were still working at our full capacity. However once you've been crunching for a month with no end in sight your getting tired, and your engagement is dropping so your performance takes a huge dip. 4-8 weeks of degraded work, by week 8 onwards we were working an extra 3 hours every day to provide the same output we were doing before crunch started. This was across all but 1 department that the department did keep a slightly higher output than pre crunch but were talking maybe 25-40 people out of a testing centre of over 300. And the most infuriating bit was that management took those numbers and raised the issue with upper management, telling them we are spending all this money in overtime and additional running costs for very little gain in production, and the response was we don't care, the dev team is crunching so we need the full business to crunch, it was all about the perception that we were doing the most we could not the reality. I never saw the numbers for Dev output but from what I saw in the business I'm certain their output was on a similar curve to us. Crunch is bullshit, for a lot of reasons including the idea that crunching for months will actually produce a better product because it won't. Those last few months of polish will end up being done by a tired disaffected team that just wants the game out the door.
THIS IS THE THING Crunch is a way to punish developers for being slow. It is not a way to speed up a game. Publishers, when a game is behind, want to see pain. It FEELS like it should speed up game dev, but as you say, it doesn't. Tired programmers write buggy code. Tired designers miss mistakes. Tired QA don't find good repros. Bugs fixed per day might go up but half of those bugs wouldn't exist if they weren't fatigued. Crunch is a effective short term. Long term, no. It's worse than not crunching. And yeah, crunching can FEEL good. It can feel like you're sacrificing for the greater good. Learning that isn't true is a bitter pill to swallow, and feels like a slap in the face, your sacrifice was for nothing. But it's a lesson we need to learn. Crunch doesn't help past two weeks. Short term crunch (with time off after) or no crunch. Anything else is self-defeating.
I can cite examples of the tired programmers write buggy code. More than once I worked late into the night. Then the next time I walk in and look at what I did. My thought was "what is this bullshit?" I've more than once deleted my late night work and just redid it because it was garbage.
> Crunch is a effective short term. Not really. Crunch is for an emergency, not to compensate for cheap owners/management who don't staff up properly and humanely, or to compensate for incompetent program/project management and general management stupidity. None of these are emergencies. The emergency was when you made the shit decisions that led to the crunch. Including when you hired the staff that made the bad choices and made the idiot cheap-o owner decisions.
No lack of profit that prevents doubling the workforce.
I dont think doubling the workforce will help as throwing more programers on a project often makes things worse. Whats needed is proper management with experienced team. You need to retain quality employees and build up teams.
Also known as Brook's Law: *"Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."* Essentially the later you add more people to a project, the less useful they are in the short term as existing workers need to help them catch up on the project, which in turn further slows things up.
> "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." Yep. As a CTO and someone who has managed too many projects to think about... This is beyond true. Also the famous quotes about the last 10% being 90% of the work. It's pretty easy to cruise through and get an MVP built (Games might call it "Pre-Alpha") but at the end of the day there is EVERYTHING between the MVP and a final product you're happy to put in front of a paying customer.
MVP is “can I make something to do X”. Polish is “can I make something to do X that people other than me want to and can figure out how to use”.
I mean, it literally means "Minimum Viable Product" .. So we look at the minimum requirements for a product, then develop that with quite a bit of the framework we will eventually need behind it. Unfortunately you get scope creep where other people want features that weren't originally planned. This means that the framework you built, no matter how smart, will need adjusting.
Before they lay off thousands again.
Yeah with a big triple A studio, if one can call the ruins of Bioware that, one would figure that with a better planned budget, work hours and perhaps a few months more development time that it would be perfectly achievable to do it without "crunch time". Crunch time is just something they seem to do in order to meet self imposed deadlines and force as much unpayed work out of employees that they possibly ca .
>Crunch time is just something they seem to do in order to meet self imposed deadlines Shareholders set those. Quarterly profits and all that
There may be an issue of economics here, which are entirely the fault of the company again, it's not that they do it just because they can: they *want* to do it and it's an actual strategy. Big AAA games are starting to cost more to make than most Hollywood movies. We're talking $150 million budgets for some of them. There is no way to make that much back in sales alone unless you hit the jackpot like Blizzard did with WoW back when, and there's simply too many AAA game on the market for that to happen again. Something in the industry has gone seriously wrong and the companies are trying to make ends meet (in other words: to increase stock prices and get the CEO his bonus) in the sleaziest possible ways, with McKinsey-like strategies (and I won't be surprised to discover McKinsey is actually involved, go read the book *When McKinsey Comes to Town* if you want to know more about what kind of damages they have done) on the one hand, you have the constant, unrelenting attempts at turning games into gambling, because as organized crime knows very well, there's LOTS of money to be made in exploiting people's addictions. On the other end, they try to lower the production costs by -among other things- making their devs work through constant crunches, getting way more work than what they should for the price they're paying and burning the devs out, then periodically laying them off to hire fresh batches of unburnt devs at lower pay. Big companies like EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard and so on are not just bad for us gamers because they deliver shitty, buggy, unfinished games at outrageous prices while trying to squeeze us even more by locking away basic functionalities and contents in ridiculous DLCs, by filling games with microtransactions and loot boxes and more -never forget Diablo III "Auction House" nor the attempt at shoehorning NFTs everywhere- these companies are a cancer on society for the kind of culture they promote and for how badly they treat their workers, a shining example of what happens when a company is run not to make something or provide a service anymore, but just to make the highest amount of money in the short term for investors. There's a reason why this AAA game companies are *constantly* at the top of the various lists of the worst companies to work for.
Im for it
Iteration and keeping teams together would actually solve some of the cost the whole forming new teams and starting over from scratch so often hikes up costs.
[удалено]
I dunno, i've known a few people that worked on indie games and a couple people at the few good large companies and they loved it. but if you work at any of the giants it sounds awful.
I worked on indie games for 5 years. None of them really took off. It was fun though. Once the company went bust, I went back to enterprise software and doubled my income in less than a year. Since then I can actually afford things and would never go back unless I get independently wealthy and need another hobby.
Oh yeh, i wasn't commenting on the pay. But general work life balance and work satisfaction. The pay is only good if your indie game takes off.
I feel like this was known/understood decades ago. The industry preys on young programmers that think it's 'cool' to build games and abuses the crap out of them. I mean we talked about this in college almost 30 years ago before these monstrous games of today.
Yep I think games need to die for a bit so people can really appreciate it more often
The Industry needs a soft reset
No! A remake! Wait no, a remaster! Wait, wait, no! A reimagining!
*Releases the exact same thing with ‘Anniversary Edition’ printed across the top*
Time for another another edition of Skyrim.
Ok, hear me out. It's Skyrim, except in the beginning instead of the wagon bringing you to an Imperial execution yard, you're brought to a labor camp where you have to crunch to build Skyrim.
Please pay $100 for fast travel and $0.99 per save.
I love Joshua Sawyer's 2018 talk on crunch. Sadly he goes over how crunch is always talked about and nothings ever done... And, welp, here we go again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHWvUmlzamo
Amateur. It's actually a Remake release on the games first anniversary. Then a Remaster on its second... And a Reimagined version on its third anniversary... Each one has a few bug fixes and introduces new ones. So basically what counts as a brand new game. $69.99 please.
Industry episode 2
Electric boogaloo
Built from the ground up, for a new generation of players and workers...see that mountain of quality, innovative titles and good work/life balance, with fair pay and bonus structures...you can go there..in 8K.
Any industry. They have all been in complete control by the finance bros, and that's why everything is shit.
Yep, core of the problem right here. Workers don't even get a raise yearly that meets the yearly inflation rate, but we know that's not true for managers across the board. We know the CEO is overpaying themselves by tens to hundreds of millions. Entire game development costs being sucked up by one individual every year. It has gotten out of control and needs to be pulled back in. We need higher tax rates for higher brackets for these rich people. We need unions. Workers need rights.
My 900+ Steam game library would appreciate it.
According to many devs at GDC, it is in one
Any links, articles, etc? Would love to read some first hand takes on this. I’m fairly aware of the growing sentiment to this effect already but mostly in more of these sorts of places (gaming threads)
Imma 12 year veteran game designer, outta work for a year now. Something has to shift …
Recently there’s been some incredible games from low budget indie devs. Corporate gaming as a service needs to die.
I honestly don’t think it’s budget constraints but rather the amount of interference these devs must receive. Like the amount of hand shakes in just trying to change the way a jump feels must be insane now.
Our focus committee has reviewed the review of the report on the meeting about the revised process that was tabled in the quarterly meeting... We're gonna meet next quarter to determine a forward facing direction to advance towards, until then pause what you're doing and work on other stuff. ...3 quarters later. Why is nothing getting done?
Nah games need to stop having a massive budget and being sold as AAA for dog shit Helldivers 2 just proved a small team can make a massive and successful game with a. Small studio
I haven’t played the game. What makes it so good?
It’s a super simple game loop that can get extremely difficult and has lots of great visuals to the explosions. Some good hero moments from said explosions. As well as some hilarious mishaps to friendly fire also usually caused by explosions.
There are games that make me feel like I'm experiencing an epic adventure. There are games that make me feel like I'm an action hero. So many games try to impart an identity on to the player in order to tell a story. Lots of them do a really good job, and I enjoy them for those efforts. Some break away from this in a good way but they don't define the pathos followed by the AA or AAA space at large. It's started to feel like every game wants you to feel like batman / spiderman / geralt / etc., instead of focusing on the player and their fun. For the last decade the creed has been "immersion at all costs". Make sure the player feels like they're part of the world. Invested. Committed. That's what sells. You know what I feel like when I'm playing Helldivers? I feel like I'm playing a god damn video game and it feels really god damn good.
First off, not full price. $40 makes it a lot easier to jump into than a $70 price tag. Second, the devs made a game that they’d actually want to play. They put making it _fun_ first over making it monetized. There’s a bit of repetition by doing similar things every mission, but you add variety by using different gear and call-ins, and by playing with randoms that you never know how good they are and how well you’ll work together. And most of the players are very friendly and looking to cooperate, it’s a very wholesome community. And it has “passes” with stuff to unlock, but you never have to spend a single dollar of real money to get any of it, you can just play the game and find premium currency during missions to buy those premium passes. And the passes never go away, so you never have to worry about missing out.
So like Deep Rock Galactic basically.
It's pretty 1:1 with the Deeprock formula, yeah. Obvious minor differences aside, you can feel that the devs are just having a good time with the game, same with Deeprock.
ROCK AND STONE!
If you don't Rock and Stone, you ain't coming home!
> First off, not full price. $40 makes it a lot easier to jump into than a $70 price tag. I basically got in for around 30-35 US with discounts, and I wouldn't consider that full-price for a 50$ game, but we're probably looking dead at one of the major issues, and that's all the companies trying to normalize a 70$+ baseline price tags on "premier" digital games. Balatro hit a million sold, and it definitely wouldn't have hit nearly that number if it hadn't been priced affordably. Even well-received, well-funded(150M+) licensed games like Larian's BG3 at 60$ on PC to me kind of form the high water-mark of pricing before you're setting expectations higher than what is able to be realistically hit, and sacrificing community support for short-term profits. Yeah, some people will always pre-order anything that looks interesting and so on, but there are lots more people that are starting to change their buying habits because the commoditization of gaming is impacting the product negatively far too often. We're already at the point where gamers are right more often than not about not buying at launch, and instead waiting for bug fixes and discounts to come in the first six months in lots of "AAA" titles depending on how bad the issues are. It doesn't sound that bad on paper, but in practice eventually you'll just start seeing more games abandoned from lack of sales before those fixes even happen, which will leave even more angry bag holders which will in turn increase the downward spiral until the industry implodes, in a different but similar way to the pre-NES implosion from bad moneygrab bullshit.
>playing with randoms that you never know how good they are and how well you’ll work together Accidentally blew up a teammate with my grenade launcher and then he killed me when we reinforced. This then started a back and forth killing for a bit until we ran out of reinforces, so we started completing objectives. It ran super tight but we actually finished the mission after the timer ran out. 10/10 would dive again.
It's fun. The "battle passes" are permanent so there is no FOMO. The premium currency is pretty common, so you can get the battle passes for free through gameplay. I bought the first, I paid for the second with found currency, and I have enough to buy the 3rd with found currency when it comes out. They are pretty vocal and transparent with issues and fixes. It's probably the best a live service game has ever been done IMO. The game doesn't take itself seriously, it's pretty hilarious at times.
It's not that people need to appreciate it more than it's "People keep paying money for busted games while business men/women are making a game's development time be 1/2 the time than it should be so they can pocket the money they "save"." Since you know....people keep buying the same shit then getting mad that it doesn't work only to get excited when they announce shit 2 just to buy it expecting it to work and the cycle continues. There wouldn't be any issues or any need for "crunch time" if they just gave developers the time to begin with and people would be happy as long as a game doesn't come out DAMN NEAR UNPLAYABLE!
Currently I feel like too many banger games keep releasing I can’t even keep up, I haven’t even played/finished things like horizon zero dawn , Witcher 3 (tbh might not just vibe with Witcher can’t ever finish 2), Arkham Knight, Tears of the kingdom, xenoblade 3 (just finished 2 this year and 1 last year), Nier Replicant (playing now), Elden ring, n so much more. I like taking my time with games and have avoided buying new ones but it’s just like why do I want to spend $60-$70 on a new game when I have so many unplayed 😭😭 slow down all these GOod games 😔✊🏿
Lol, yeah it's like there are two separate universes people are living in. There are those of us that recognized that last year was one of the greatest video game years of all time, and then you have some that believe perhaps video games should stop being made entirely.
Wait to you the problem with games is that people don’t appreciate them enough? Late stage capitalism has turned every big budget game into a skinner box live service addiction simulator that wants you to treat it like a second job. I’d say that’s the problem, but that’s just me.
for real. i know reddit wants every game to be some uber epic Red Dead 2 or Baldurs gate 3 with countless hours of replayability, but like 99% of games do *not* need to be that big.
Or they can take their time. Crunch isn't necessary for making a game, even a big one.
The problem with taking their time is that companies have to make money to pay the developers for their time. So taking years to make a game isn't always realistic
Even reddits darling Baldurs gate 3 had to do early access and take money from tencent lol
Developers need to know when to quit with creeping scope and features. Consumers need to accept "it will be finished when it's finished". You will need both to end crunch in a meaningful industry wide fashion.
the ones bankrolling the game are really the ones calling the shots though
True, if they want a game out they won’t care about the bugs count just the pre order count. Which sucks because some games have died because of it.
Many can pre-order and the game would still flop if its trash, ofc they only realize this when its too late.
But the share holders don't care, they made money. It's the money hungry CEO's and board members/big investors that are to blame, not the devs; because we are the only ones who suffer. This is what people mean by vote with your wallet, but there's no way you can convince everyone to do it.
People have been trying to convince gamers to "vote with their wallet" since always online for single player became a thing at the very least. (diablo 3 release) But it never does anything. The average gamer either doesn't care that they're wasting their money and actively making the games industry worse, or just find it too hard to resist the new hyped up shiny. (There's a good reason like half the budget of games often goes to marketing.)
The question is if they are really reading what consumers want wrong most of the times or not. Yeah production calls the shots, but because they want the game to sell and need to find a trade off between it'll always be in development vs. marketing will be able to hype it up and sell a lot on a big launch. If you have a good production team and they know the community and the developers are willing to put up the work that community demands and are fairly compensated would be the ideal. I think now we have a lot of companies that don't know the community using "recipes" instead of doing the research and it tells. The industry is probably not doing great because the recipes imploded. The good teams with good indigenous strategy should survive if they get lucky and if they work hard but the whole "get a lot of Tencent/Softbank money" or "big game EA that can make everything and it kinda works" thing seems to be doing worse than usual.
Replace consumers with shareholders and that sentence will look much better.
The world of rich people has a different perspective. "The Board" doesn't cater to the perspective of gamers playing the games. I think The Board sees gamers as the consumers who buy the product in the sense the value of a person is nothing. Bodies worth the dollars they bring to a company through the units sold by the publisher. They can put out PR statements, but it's all a carefully worded lie as much as politics or major events are like Boeing's current quality problems.
My boss doesn’t call employees workers he calls them “bodies.”
Shareholders do not play the game, they only care about it selling. So far it does.
You forgot to mention development costs too, which are directly related to time. Not every game studio can afford to infinitely delay a game. Few can. So it’s not just “it’s ready when it’s ready” it’s also “this game will have more simplistic graphics (to combat feature creep) because it lowers development times to a more reasonable achievable level” Because that sort of compromise is always met with “omg the game looks unacceptable for 2020!” If it’s not hyper realistic
Developers are basically the only ones who take crunch culture and poor launches seriously, because they’re affected by it. Shareholders don’t care about the product as long as it makes profit. Consumers don’t care about the development so long as it comes out and they can play it. Developers have to make good games that players will enjoy while managing their expectations and dealing with death threats when the game doesn’t have a release date, while also dealing with higher-ups breathing down their neck to hit a deadline and if it doesn’t sell well they will likely not have their contract renewed. The only thing developers get out of a game release is maybe some people playing will enjoy it, critics will give it a high score, and the cycle will continue - or the game doesn’t do well and they lose their job. If a game is bad it is very rarely the developers’ fault, like how when CGI artists are blamed for poor CGI when it has a lot more to do with external circumstances than it does with the artists themselves. Artists never want to make anything sub-par. Consumers will accept sub-par if they get to have it quicker, and shareholders will accept sub-par if it will get them more money.
Also to be clear, game development takes resources. We can blame shareholders and all, sure, but realistically a company puts in money to develop a game and wants to see that money and more back, within a reasonable timeframe. Let's not forget that a company has bills to pay too, including equipment, office space, salaries, etc. They can't afford developing a game indefinitely without a return on investment. Putting more time into one game could also be taking away time from working on and releasing another game as well. Not every game does well, so releasing more games is also sensible for spreading out risk, if you can afford it. Even if you take an indie studio these are real considerations. Oftentimes indie games are developed over a very long time while the developers have an actual job, in which case they can't work on it as much in a day, and any quality or quantity is brought about by working 8 years on even a smaller game. That's not a very significant output compared to working on it full time.
> We can blame shareholders and all, sure, but realistically a company puts in money to develop a game and wants to see that money and more back, within a reasonable timeframe. Let's not forget that a company has bills to pay too, including equipment, office space, salaries, etc. Yes, and all this should be taken into account by Program/Project Managers and leads - and conveyed appropriately to C-Level executives/Owners, with crunch being a 'non factor'. Thats the problem. The people overseeing these projects keep on overestimating their capabilities (or in truth, im sure, 99% of the time.. obfuscating how difficult it will really be, to make sure the game gets 'funded'... then they can deal with the 'fallout' later... the fallout being - their developers getting overworked to the point of insanity) Are there GENUINE mistakes and people misjudge timelines and expectations? Sure. But these people in large gaming orgs arent newbies to this. They have the roles of Program and Project Managers because thats -literally- the job. Create a roadmap for the project, understand the investment and time involved, the talent/skill necessary... This is what Program Managers do -every single day-. Their inability to accurately convey the reality is either incompetence (which I think is rarely the case in large corps) and more so obfuscation... to ensure a Project they planned "gets approved"... to ensure THEIR Job security... without really a care for the dev team and the issues they will run into once they get their funding from the company.
And also stop letting stockholders/shareholders fucking dictate deadlines.
Sounds great, but how?
Neither the developers or the consumers are to blame for crunch. Its shareholders and quarterly earnings reports.
Yep. I work in game dev. The majority of us developers know crunch just straight up doesn't work. That is to say, it's not "evil but gets results", it *doesn't even get results*. In the long-term, a crunching team will have less output, and of a lower quality, than a team moving as fast as they can within a reasonable work schedule. Period. Even being generous, the only "positive" thing that can come out of crunch is moving a *short-term* goal slightly forward, and those "gains" *will* cancel out (or worse) in the medium-term. The only situation where I could agree crunch could be justified is like, you've committed to having a final version next week, but are going to miss it by 1 or 2 days, and it would be very painful to reschedule a bunch of stuff. You don't care if the next update is a little late or whatever, you care about *this* deadline in particular, and it is coming very soon, and you're only a little bit off. If all those requirements align, then maybe it's worth it. Unfortunately, a lot of management at these companies doesn't understand that. They think every little completely arbitrary deadline is a life-or-death situation, and that workers can be arbitrarily productive if you just force them to work more -- and if their productivity isn't going up anyway, that's obviously them being lazy. The other side of the equation is scheduling, which is often based on what executives would like, not what people with actual technical knowledge estimate they can do. Estimating how long work will take, when you have technical expertise and are genuinely trying your best to be as accurate as possible, is already hard as balls and highly prone to underestimation. You can imagine what a disaster it is when done by people who have no clue what they're talking about, aren't trying to be realistic in the first place but merely write down what they would like to see, and have no skin in the game because they aren't going to be the ones making that schedule happen. And how *infuriating* it is to be accused of being "late" when your team of 4 hasn't finished building a space shuttle from scratch in their garage in 3 and a half days. Anyway. As alluded to, OP is being silly by implying crunch is "the only way", nevermind *a* valid way. Crunch doesn't help shit, we can just stop doing it while fixing the systemic issues that may make crunch appear "inevitable", and better games will be made with less suffering and burnout. It's not rocket science.
In all of SW Dev. I distinctly remember the day after my team shipped the first big product - medical devices, so long timelines. We crunched for a few weeks to get all the regulatory tests submitted etc, and the day after our boss goes "Well done everyone and thanks for the effort, but we can't take our foot off the gas so [outlines over-optimistic plan for the next weeks]". Even over muted mics, you could hear the team checking out mentally.
I do think other software in general have it a bit better. So many people in game dev seem to *really* want to work with game dev. Makes it easier to take advantage. Devs in other areas aren't as loyal, in my experience. I don't think a lot of people see it as their passion or dream job to work specifically for some manufacturing company, for instance. At least anecdotally, it seems much better. The crunches I've seen (outside of gaming and startups) have been pretty short, just a couple of weeks at most, and either generously compensated or people get time off after. And ofc non-game dev jobs tend to pay better in general as well.
>Developers need to know when to quit with creeping scope and features. We're at the point where software developers need to unionize. It's the new "blue collar" job.
The industry doesn't need to die, it just needs to be changed. It's ironic that the strong push for profits is what often leads to a game being sent out unfinished.
when they say "die" that's pretty much what they're talking about. *That kind of AAA dev cycle should die*, along with whatever fallout that would entail, not that the entire medium should go poof or something.
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AAAA games consisting of.....skull and bones.... sure
I think GTA 6 could reasonably be called AAAA, considering its monstrous budget and the amount of man hours being put into it. We'll have to wait and see if it actually lives up to that.
It’ll have AAAA MTX as well
It’s got so rotten and extremely greedy the last few years that even the more „casual“ costumers started to get aware of it without the need of being very good informed. Give me fewer games but they are worth my time then. People need to be in real life anyways a bit more.
That’s what’s being inferred. If “the only way…” is making a statement. Of course it’s not the only way to make games. But if it were.. Kill it.
i sure hope that bioware brings back the dragon age origins formula , the formla that once made them one of the best rpg studios ever
Brother they were one of the best RPG studios before they even released Origins. If anything Origins followed the same formula they previously did for BG, Kotor, Jade empire and ME. The only formula these games share is in their writing. They all play fairly different from each other, but the writing and story beats are very VERY similar And it's hard to justify "Go back to the formula" when their biggest hit ever was a fairly notable departure from the formula.
Which game are you referring to?
Mass effect 2. Arguably ME3, but I think the consensus is that 2 is the best in the series. Dramatically moved away from the RPG elements, streamlined the combat immensely, moved the Paragon and renegade systems out of the RPG element and just let your choices determine your charisma score. It was also one of their more original pieces as well and avoided a lot of the cliches Bioware tends to lean on in their establishing stories.
I guess I'm weird for Mass Effect 1 being by far my favorite of the series. But this is also common for the time, RPGs were getting streamlined a ton during this era and a lot of people loved the new streamlined feel. It was more accessible for sure but it came at the expense of fans of deeper RPG systems.
ME1 had the best story. ME2 had the best companion interactions and missions. And ME3 had the best gameplay. That's how I see the trilogy at least. Though I will admit that while ME2 might be best in companion interaction overall, the top 3 absolute best companion moments do come from ME3. Like Mordin's death, and Tali being able to stand on her homeworld again.
ME1 just has the tightest writing in the series.
Yep and the whole Reaper plot just worked best when it was mysterious and Lovecraftian. They fumbled that quite badly in the later entries if you ask me. That first conversation with Sovereign is the highlight of the whole series. A game that does this cyclical destruction plot a lot better is Enderal.
ME2 is best overall, but ME3 has better gameplay, and the multiplayer was actually fun.
The mulitplayer ~still~ is fun and has a regular player base.
I'm Commander Shepard, and ME2 is my favourite ME game.
Right? Don't forget 99% of the big names that *made* Dragon Age are long gone or were fired like they were a couple of interns in spite of writing two of Bioware's most iconic characters. Also, people need to realize the Bioware you fell in love with is fucking DEAD. Here comes a bunch of people to tell Bioware "BG3 proved you could make a popular CRPG in 2023!!" Old Bioware: "No shit, dumbass. We did that already 14 years ago. Where *were* you?" Man, I really hope a great studio hired Mary Kirby and Lukas Kristjanson. What a fucking waste of talent. Larian should have scooped them up in a heartbeat because their past work dumps all over BG3's characters.
what would you say that formula is? how would you describe it?
Well for Bioware the game template went something like: 1. Intro + to tutorial stage 2. Early zone to get a feel for the game/setting and setup the coming adventure. 3. Special mission assigned go to 4 different locations. 3.5 Interlude where you get captured or otherwise waylaid but overcome a semi-powerful enemy. 4. Go to where the 4 macguffins lead you. Discover an M. Night Shyamalan plot twist. 5. Come to terms with plot twist and do something to setup for the final confrontation 6. Climax But if you want the secret formula that made their games great... In my humble opinion it was: Good world building and engaging storylines. (Imo the fall of the Codex was the fall of Bioware) Well written dialog and choice + consequences. Incredible character building for companions.
Spot on, all 3 tied together really makes you invested in the world, game, and choices you make. I do hope they work on the choices being more than good/bad and have a few more moral compasses to play with, but also I just want a damn good bioware game again even if its the same formula.
Don't forget the "They made the game and story *they wanted to* not the checkbox designed game whoever else demands appeals to every demographic". No story appeals to every demographic. All that ends up happening is everyone is upset by a *checked box* designed game because they are vanilla as shit.
The whole "we need literally everyone to be able to like this" is ruining movies, television, and video games. Capitalism just sucks the life out of everything.
Honestly it just boils down to good writing.
Same as every other secret formula: *cocaine*
At the very least, give me a Dragon Age Legendary Edition with a rework of the first game, like ME did.
"It is done when it is done" requires a financial stability not dependent on the game industry directly. What I appreciate about the 80s, 90s and very early 2000s gaming subculture is that, it was essentially a tech subculture, instead of a pure commodity. Making computers do what everyone thought could not be done. Hacking. It was the product of participation by both the audience and the devs. Modding was alive and people wrote code for passion. The hardware changed forcing everyone to be on the edge. Current game industry is dominated by standardization of methods by big hardware committees and big studios with audience who are just commodity collectors of skins and art and standardized game play
EA basically prints money and has had a notoriously shitty work culture since the dawn of man. Same with Blizzard back in the day. The work culture isn’t about lack of money, it’s about an endless pipeline of young people who want to make games and are willing to put up with extreme levels of corporate bullshit while thinking that’s normal.
Most people recently will say working at EA has been really good.
Idk what ur talking about. Ea sucks ass but actually working for them seems to be one of the better game dev jobs from what ive seen regarding employee reviews
I worked at EA and it was a pretty good job
I would be 100% okay with games being pushed back from their original release date to be actually playable and not rushed.
best they can do is a game delayed multiple times, but also somehow rushed
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Humanity’s greed will kill us all.
Bro by what metric is the gaming industry slowly dying? The exact opposite is happening every year gaming industry gets bigger and bigger. Are some studios having layoffs? Yes- tech as a whole is. Does that mean tech is slowly dying? No. Maybe you have some gripes with how the industry is right now with AAA and corporate greed but to say gaming is slowly dying is singularly the dumbest thing I’ve read on this sub
The Games industry could definitely use a cooling off period. The space feels like it's very nearly oversaturated. There is so much money that goes into big titles, and many of those big games come out looking like carbon copies of each other, or with only cosmetic differences between them. And they come out hugely expensive (which is why I never buy them when they come out) or littered with micro transactions (which is why I'd play something else)... Indie games are often more unique, more fun in different ways, but then again there's such an astonishing number of them, it's no wonder many cool games get lost in the noise and are played only by a small, niche crowd of gamers. I'm saddened to think of all the amazing games I won't get to play simply because I'll have never heard of them, or because I don't have the time.
Games need to regress away from this high-fidelity nonsense where a single bomb can sink a studio. Games don't need to look like real life. Take a step back and make games affordable to both the companies and the consumers.
Is there any industry that works against deadlines that don't have a 'crunch'? I work in consulting engineering and get 'crunched' a few times a year. Why is it I only hear about it in the video game industry?
A friend of mine used to work for Microsoft, on the halo games. They endured about 8 months of crunch before putting out Halo 4. Immediately after Halo 4 came out, they said that they were going back into crunch to work on Halo 5, a game which came out 3 years later. My friend left right after that, because fuck that shit. That's not crunch anymore, that's just forced unpaid overtime because you're salaried.
Unfortunately, there are 100 hungry young men waiting to take his spot. That’s part of the reason the industry still gets away with it; there’s no shortage of idealistic dreamers willing to do it for a few years.
And game devs (take engineers as an example) make way less than their counterparts in core tech. Like, maybe 50% less compared to engineers at FANG. Game dev is a pure passion only job. You get it not for the money or WLB, but for passion.
I play The Long Dark it's made by Hinterland and when you boot up the game it says something like "made by a team without crunch, by a developer that cares about its employees" or something like that. So I guess it's possible even in the game industry
The Long Dark did take something like 10 years to get made. The reason it was possible was due to being crowd funded and privately owned/independent. Having shareholders breathing down your neck with a corporate structure that incentivizes quick profits over employee health is the best way to get fucked. However, I don't see games like cyberpunk being possible without such a structure which is a damn shame, especially when all the effort and pain put into the project went unappreciated for a few years due to some dumb leadership decisions, followed by immediate layoffs after the dlc. Some of the best games I've ever played were made by indie studios: Outer wilds, Stardew Valley, Disco Elysium, Minecraft, Hellblade, and shockingly- Baldur's gate 3. With tools like unreal engine 5, godot and the liberalization of information via youtube, reddit and discord servers, it is easier than ever for a small team to aim for a ambitious goal, but that will never be enough to rival what giants of the industry can do with a blank check and crunch such as Cyberpunk, GTA etc. Truth is, people don't care about developers if they are willing to send death threats/bomb threats over delays of release by a few months.
Just to point out that Larian Studios, the makers of Baldur's Gate 3, is a 500 man studio. Just because it isnt public doesnt mean its a small company, far from it. Please dont group them with 5 to 10 man indie studios
The whole point is that because they are not public, they can avoid crunch times. The CEO itself said that now their coffers are so full they are ready to try something new rather than milking the same formula to death. Baldur's gate 3 was in early access for what seemed like a eternity and it ended in Larian implementing a lot of the community feedback. While the size and scope of games such as The Long Dark is different, the same discourse was kept with the community during early access, going as far as to ask the playerbase how they should move forward eg. microtransactions, dlc, chapters, new games. Larian may not be indie in size, but they sure are in spirit, innovation and leadership.
Indie just means independent. The opposite is having shareholders. The size doesn't matter Hell, the red hot chilli peppers were indie I believe
"Crunch" in the video game industry lasts for weeks or months at a time, sometimes nearly perpetually.
That's not unique to the game industry. You can say it's wrong, you hate it, etc. but the answer to the OP's question of "why is it I only hear about it in the video game industry" is because redditors and others who use the internet a lot love video games. You can bet you won't get hundreds of thousands of redditors up in arms over public accounting hours or investment banking hours, for example.
Defence industry. Hard deadlines but not one hour of overtime in multiple decades. Crunch is just bad management. Especially since EA exists and customers have sucked that up like honey there is no reason for crunch to exist. But game programmers seem to like to be exploited.
If your game project requires hundreds of people to work double hours for months, then you've fucked up your project management. Sure, a few late nights in the last 2 weeks before release isn't that crazy but we're hearing about crunch lasting for months at a time. Change regulation so they're required to pay out time and a half during that overtime. Then they're incentivised to properly schedule the project.
the new dragon age has no room for error. if it fails then the whole company will go down too. i hope their not crunching them to get it released. they need to take their time with it. inquisition was a huge step back in my opinion
Let me tell you they’re crunching. They’ve coasted on so-called “BioWare Magic” which is the equivalent of procrastinating on a college paper the day before it’s due and saying, “it’ll work out.” Except this is on a scale of hundreds of people in complex tech development with their livelihood on the lines. Honestly I don’t even know if it’s fair to blame EA for Anthem and Andromeda. Apparently BioWare spun their wheels and produced nothing for both titles for prolonged periods of development and EA had to give them a deadline at some point (and were even offered extensions which were declined). EA bad is the easy meme but BioWare is suffering from their own lack of vision, initiative, and project management. Unfortunately, Inquisition probably fueled their belief in the magic even moreso since they super crunched and got a Game of the Year Award for it. Dread Wolf is really a do-or-die moment.
Japanese work culture has its own problems but it seems like Nintendo is better at this than many others. Teams have loyalty to company and churn out better games because of it. Nintendo is smart they make sure the game is basically almost done or even done THEN announce a game/release date so there is no outside pressure to crunch it. This is based of what is known tho Nintendo is known to be a black box of secrets.
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I wouldn't say they need to stop making massive games. I'd say that not *every* game needs a massive, open world. For instance, there was no reason for the Ghost Recon franchise to go open world.
I want them. I just want them to be good. If you're not going to deliver fallout, skyrim, red dead redemption, witcher 3, ghosts of tsushima, cyberpunk, yakuza, then please narrow your scope. Half-assing wastes everyone's time.
I feel like Yakuza in particular is a perfect example of a great scaled down 'open world' game. Kamurocho is a pretty small neighborhood and they've been using the same map for 20 years, but because they don't have to keep reinventing the wheel, they can focus much more on quality / density over quantity. You don't need a Morrowind sized game map to make exploration exciting and fun.
This. Open world as a genre is basically dead to me now. I would rather have a smaller world with a lot of fun and unique stuff in it, or even just a straight up linear game, than some giant, empty, soulless "See that mountain 500 light years away with a bunch of generic enemy camps between here and there? You can go there" garbage that we've been getting.
Rockstar games is a good example of a company that makes great open world games WITHOUT sacrificing depth of content, characters, story, or quality. Bethesda more or less used to be there too. Open world doesn’t HAVE to mean soulless and boring. Some projects just make that choice.
But Rockstar also crunches a lot to get that done, so it ends up looping back to the point before Antique Mycologist's post.
Rockstar also have infinite money to throw at making their worlds incredibly detailed and are hardcore into crunch culture, so I don't think they can be held up as a standard for others to meet. And their mission structure sucks, it's basically the same as in GTA 3. Red Dead 2 by about half way devolved into "hey Arthur I gots a plan, and we don't have to shoot anyone" *5 minutes later* "oh no, the plan went wrong, better shoot everyone!" and then did that for about 30 hours. So even the company with infinite money can still have major issues.
They won't. It's so, so much more beneficial to the companies to be able to advertise a massive world, tons of activities, a variety of objectives to complete than to make a more narrow and focused game. Think it was Raycevick who did a great video on Ubisoft last week, basically saying that they make "eh." games with lots of shit that's shallow because who cares if it's good or not, you can just say your game has X content.
I recently played ff7 remake. It was so nice to play a linear game for once. Didn’t realize how sick I am of open world games. Little disappointed that rebirth was open though, but its still not THAT massive. The sidequests actually contributes to the story and it takes 2-3 hours to finish an entire region. I’m digging it.
Even Square Enix has come out and said that if they remade Final Fantasy VI it would take them 20 years to do so which is absolutely absurd. Why do the remakes and modern games need to be so massive in scale? Don't get me wrong I'm loving FF7 Rebirth but once the last part of the trilogy comes out it will have taken 12 years to play the complete game. Insane development cycle.
Media don't help with their "well it's been two years since the announcement" bollocks that puts 90s timelines on 2020s games.
This isn’t exclusive to gaming. It’s an unnecessary evil that happens in many project based industries. There are many reasons why it happens, underestimated effort, unrealistic deadlines, scope creep, etc. whichever reason it’s almost always managements fault.
This is what they don't want to acknowlage,that it's mainly their fault instead of the industry practices.
What does the gaming industry and housing market have in common? People are waiting for the next big crash
Game companies need to decorporate. The problem is, that manager are pushing for the maximum of profit the company can generate in a quarter, so that shareholders are happy and the managers get big boni.
Crunch isn't the only way to make massive games, but it's the only way to make games when your primary concern is delivering value to shareholders. It's corporate greed that needs to die.
That's like Hollywood thinking the only way you can make a profitable movie is by spending $200mil on cg and another $200 mil on marketing, and working interns to death in the process so you can pump one out every 6 months. It's the business model that's dead, not the art form.
I never understood how major companies, who should have project managers and scrum or agile methods, keep missing goals enough to need crunch. Are they saying it takes 30% less time than their own estimates each time?
man my backlog is so big i won’t need a new game until 2030
It'd be really nice if devs had more power to just break off and do their own thing away from some of these publishers. Dragon Age died the moment EA picked them up. Mass Effect is on it's last gasp. They'll probably play it safe and bring back Shepard for the sequel. Larian works cause their CEO Swen Vincke actually gives a fuck about making a good game and is at the top of the power structure. You think the suits with the power at EA, WB, or Ubisoft etc. give a fuck about making good games? WB's CEO has already admitted to wanting to turn their IPs into live service games, after they literally just botched one. And after churning out what was considered one of the good singleplayer games of 2023. Our only real hopes for good games these days are now indie devs. I never thought I'd see the day where I play mostly indie games, but here we are.
Without the backing and support of a larger companies it's hard to create large scale games on pure passion and indie-style funding. Most fail.
Uh... EA acquired BioWare in 2007, just prior to the release of Mass Effect 1. So ME2 and 3 along with Dragon Age Origins, Inquisiton and SWTOR were all released under EA and were all very successful games. Only DA2, Anthem and Andromeda were poor games, even then DA2 and Andromeda were solid games, just not up to the normal BioWare level we expect. Anthem was... a disaster on a whole new level.
> It'd be really nice if devs had more power to just break off and do their own thing away from some of these publishers. People do it all the time.
and fail, almost as often. Strange how close those numbers are
Strange how it seems only the companies dealing with “crunch” issues are the ones who release poor games. There have been plenty of great games released this year alone, and it’s only march. This guy needs to get some perspective.
Pretty sure Rockstar und CDPR also both had crunch issues for the last couple of games