the-pi-guy said:
>not core devs Feels like there's a lot of assumption on how much work an additional team member would be doing. >Todd Howard said in an E3 2018 interview, about 2 and a half years after active development began, that Starfield was already in a playable state. The issue is playable state is a pretty vague description. That could mean anything from the basic gameplay systems are working and functional to everything is playable from start to finish with every feature that they plan to implement already implemented. >a bigger core dev team than any previous BGS game by quite some margin That's where everything is trending. More artists to make higher quality assets. More software engineers to work on the engine. Starfield is a new IP, and it's hard to say what their goals are. This might just be a bigger game than anything they've made before by a wide margin. >unless Covid forcing them to work from home for the past year hurt them alot. And I'm sure it did. A lot of companies weren't prepared to move to remote work, and it's delayed stuff that would seem unthinkable to most forum goers. |
The thing is games are one long journey of change and iteration and what impact these steps have along the development path aren't always isolated to the original focus be it graphics - narrative - gameplay - music, etc the singular often affects the whole and how these these complexities are handled can make or break a game and even if they accomplish what they set out to achieve.
Just the length of development alone may see a developer reach a point and it may occur more than once, where they have to decide on releasing a game that while fine and holds up well with published games that started development around the same time, but it is now 1/ 2 years later and your game is now looking out of date so you're left with the conundrum of what to do, continue and hope that all that previous work can be redeveloped in a short enough time frame to allow a more modern release but with the risk of the cycle repeating, or do you bite the bullet and rely on the quality of the work done offsetting the negatives that come with lengthy development.
the various parts of the development cycle can be unknowns but a look at the respective history of developers can shed some light into the probability of a date being realistic or not.
Last edited by mjk45 - on 21 May 2021Research shows Video games help make you smarter, so why am I an idiot
