shikamaru317 said:
It was 2 years, then they bumped it up to 3 I think. However, from what I've heard Ubi kind of lied a bit about how much dev time Unity got, they added the time that the programmers spent working on the new next-gen engine to the dev time for Unity, actual dev time for Unity was likely pretty low considering how buggy and poorly optimized it was. Considering how polished Victory looks already I'd guess that Victory began development as soon as the new next-gen engine was completed, which means it should have an extra year of actual dev time compared to Unity. It also helps that there's new lead studio making Victory, they seem to be doing a good job so far considering how polished this looks. I get the feeling that Ubisoft Montreal is probably pretty dysfunctional, they're a huge dev and they have tons of games in development at any one time, it's probably like a zoo there. |
Engine development is a very important part of game development. There are games that have been in development for 7-8 years and still came out buggy, that isn't really a good indercator of how long development was. Unity is an increadibly ambitious game in terms of content, that would have taken an insane amount of time and has to be done after the design process is already mostly done. And game design is usually the first thing you do as that informs the engine and content design. There is no reason to doubt that development on Uniy started 4 years ago. Starting out with a small design and tech team of a dozen or so people, which design the core game design, concept art and the main story as well as building the core engine and tools, prtotypes etc. Scaling up to around a hundred over the next couple years as they add different specialist and start designing all the missions, modes and sorting out the production pipeline, building vertical slices and demos. And then quickly ramping up over the last 18 months peaking at the ~800 devs across 10 studios, filling out the world with the insane amount of content that is in modern Ubisoft games. That is how typical development goes, Ubisoft just does it bigger than anyone else. Victory likely started just after Assassin's Creed 3 shipped. So development would have been mostly parelal to Unity. With a lot of shared tech, and production piepline.
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