I installed the first one but never got around to paying it cause I beat the game so many times but it’s been forever since I played jak 2 or 3 so I’m much more interested in this.
Chet Falizek, a dev who led L4D and a couple other games at valve talks about this a lot on TikTok, now that he’s running an indie studio. He’s a cool guy, would fit in on .ml or something for sure.
Valve was a completely new company then. They weren’t going indie, but Sierra didn’t pay them for the remake of Half-Life. In the documentary they talk about financing it by creating Half-Life: Day One.
Usually publishers have multiple products in development simultaneously with varying degrees of investment, the more money invested into a studio to develop a game the more urgent they want it finished.
Some basic things to note, that may or may not be obvious.
Producers and shareholders are the ones still thinking gaming audience can be milked at the same rate as the past few decades.
The alternative to current model of game launch + DLCs/features added over the year is that the game is not launched at all until ready and full featured.
Gamer audience is privileged, consumerist and impatient. And most of the audience is either autistic or neurodivergent with impulsive and/or compulsive disorders, and have unstable hyperfocus and obsession issues.
Edit: “most” people are not but a significant number of people are. That was overestimated. Our generation’s psychological patterns differ from the ones before that did not play these modern and/or 3D games.
And most of the audience is either autistic or neurodivergent with impulsive and/or compulsive disorders, and have unstable hyperfocus and obsession issues.
You have no clue how ADHD or other neurological disorders get accelerated due to video games of various kinds. Many other conditions like epilepsy, vertigo also get accelerated or triggered.
A significant amount of the audience is. “Most” probably is an overestimation and a bit sensational. I am neurodivergent, am ex-pro gamer and I have spent enough time gaming as a teen to know the thought processes gamers go through. Remember, we are the first generation to have played these modern games that were not just 8-bit.
The alternative to current model of game launch + DLCs/features added over the year is that the game is not launched at all until ready and full featured.
I haven’t seen significant numbers of people complaining that their drip feed of content isn’t coming fast enough. I’ve seen people complaining about spending a non-trivial amount of money on a visibly broken game that clearly had plenty of developer resources for microtransactions and loot boxes.
Gamer audience is privileged, consumerist and impatient. And most of the audience is either autistic or neurodivergent with impulsive and/or compulsive disorders, and have unstable hyperfocus and obsession issues.
Being a game developer had its moments but was still easily the worst job I’ve ever had, predominantly due to the community.
That said, I still wouldn’t go diagnosing millions of people with some bullshit I just made up.
I’m not being snarky there. If there are no deadlines and unlimited feature creep, you get Star Citizen. Or rather, you never get Star Citizen except as a janky hyper-monetized pre-alpha.
Nah star citizen was a scam first, game second. If it ever produces a game it will have been purely incidental to continuing to run the scam and milk those whales
I kind of believe Chris Roberts himself is just an overambitious perfectionist. He pulled the same kind of bullshit with Freelancer, which only released because Microsoft put its foot down.
I can also believe that a lot of the top people around him are grifters feeding his ambition and perfectionism to keep the gravy train running.
Either way, they got my Kickstarter money so the only entertainment I’ll ever get from that game is opining about it like I know anything.
tbf that’s a lot easier to say when you’re the president of one of the richest companies in the industry. I don’t disagree, but not everybody has the resources to just keep developing forever, and that’s easy to forget too.
In the documentary this quote is from he said that about thr development of HL1. To be fair the devs themselves said they voluntairily crunched quite a bit and had some time constraints at the end of the game.
But he’s also president of one of the richest companies in the industry because he always said this.
And while your point is valid for smaller studios, it feels like it’s usually used by the big ones that do have the resources, but would rather give more money to investors.
Yeah, no one has a problem with small indie groups doing early access, aka terraria, rimworld, factorio, minecraft. It’s about keeping expectations in check and having a good fun base game.
Rogue Legacy 2 had a great early access in part because it was regular releases with a lot of communication and they set great expectations for it. I knew what I got myself into and had a blast trying each new area as it came out.
The context for this was them deciding to take the time to finish the game properly even if they were no longer going to get paid to do it (the publisher would stop funding).
Didn’t colonial marine turn out to actually have really good AI that totally changed the game feel that had been broken by a single misplaced semi-colon or something?
polygon.com/…/aliens-colonial-marines-fixing-code… yep, a code typo broke the alien AI. Unfortunately for that game though no amount of delays could’ve helped it, there were many more problems besides the AI. The AI was just the biggest problem.
wizards are turning into Gaben as he echoes across eternity. It seems like he’s turning into a wizard, but that’s because we can only see behind us in time.
Game developers seem to be very afraid to change core features or the story of the game in a major way (even if the actual work would not be too extensive) after release. But there are enough examples where games improved a lot after release.
Sure, the initial impression of the game might be ruined, but that is more a consequence for the producers that most often where responsible for the rushed release, than for the gamers or developers, of the game is fixed afterwards.
Game delays are okay, but let’s maybe have a conversation about why valve is incapable of producing the kind of content it used to. Half-life 3 isn’t “delayed”, it’s not happening because of internal reasons.
Half life 3 had never been announced to be in development. It’s not delayed, late, on-time, or anything else for us except a hope it might eventually come out.
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