Comment on Xbox Drops Work on ‘Contraband’ Video Game After Four Years
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 week agoIt doesn’t take “6 years to demo a basic gameplay loop”. They are pushing vertical slices, proofs of concepts, etc internally near constantly. The issue is when you get told “no, not like that. We want it to be more… you know?” and so much of that work gets scrapped. ESPECIALLY as time moves on and those vertical slices are also being done alongside levels, weapons, cutscenes, etc all while never knowing what the gameplay even will be.
Is there an issue at multiple levels of management? Yeah. But when you have a single “boss” you tend to actually have something. It might not be great but you have a vision you can work towards and release. Rather than five new visions every time you get a new contact at HQ.
But hey, keep on leaping to defend the mega corporations.
jordanlund@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I’m not defending anyone, I’m attacking shitty game development.
When the first teaser came out, people went “Well, that’s pretty, but what’s the game?”
youtu.be/jWpcUH-tKEU
Then, reportedly, the whole thing was rebooted in 2021 and we still weren’t able to see what the game mechanic was.
youtu.be/DKDt057dhR0
I get it, it LOOKED great, but as a potential player I need to know what the actual fuck I’m doing. What’s the goal? What am I supposed to do? What are the tools I have to do that?
Everwild Devs: 🤷♂️
If the suits were screwing around and changing things, we STILL should have seen what the actual game was before and after the changes. We never did. Never will.
That’s not a corporate problem, it’s a development problem.
Compare that to a teaser for a game that actually released:
youtu.be/OxzWlIbnp3U
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
You DO realize that you aren’t their bosses, right? That was Microsoft. Microsoft almost assuredly saw a LOT of internal content. It just didn’t get packaged up into sizzle reels to be shown at the keighleys for 50k for a few seconds in between kojima appearances.
At the end of the day, game development is a business. You only see what is deemed worth publishing. Take Night Dive for example. They have a ridiculously solid portfolio and, outside of System Shock (which was kickstarted?), don’t talk about ANYTHING until it is ready to release. Does that mean they are in a constant state of doing nothing and deserving to get fired up until that brief window where we all see Hexen and Heretic being pulled from store shelves a few hours before a (funny enough) Microsoft press conference?
jordanlund@lemmy.world 1 week ago
No, I have just been working in software development for 13 years.
If I spent six years on a project and could not demonstrate core functionality after all that time, I’d be fired too.