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potato_hamster on 12 October 2016
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Cerebralbore101 said:
potato_hamster said:

Video game companies pour millions of dollars into educated and experienced project managers and plan games years in advance and there are still hundreds of instances of video games having extended crunch period.

I mean sure, on paper all of these issues can be planned away, in the real world, life happens, and that can completely shred even the best laid plans in a matter of days.  People have been making video games for over 4 decades now, and software development for even longer. Yet crunch is something that happens industry wide on varying scales. If people actually think they have realistic and pracitcal solutions to eliminate crunch and still keep game development costs and deadlines the same, then by all means, become an industry legend and prove your worth. The industry is begging for it.

I've been on five different projects. Two problems always arise. They are feature creep, and art demands. The art team gets bogged down trying to make something that looks glorious, as opposed to making something that just looks good. The programmers always get stuck trying to implement one too many features into a game. Not every game has to have ridiculous 50k polygon models that are expertly textured, and animated. Not every game needs to be a massive open world with a crafting system, real world economy, stealth elements, etc. Another issue is that nobody does pen and paper playtesting anymore. Too often, we found out that a feature or element just wasn't fun, long after we had spent a lot of time getting it to work in the game. We could have just saved time by making a pen and paper prototype and trying our ideas before getting to work on them. 

 

AAA gaming is often just unsustainable. Everyone just needs to dail the scope of their games back a bit, but the customers won't allow it. They don't have a clue what it is like to make a game, and they demand cutting edge everything. Thirty FPS, 720p, and moderate polycounts are fine. 

You'll get no arguments from me. Well said. I've seen a lot of these problems as well.