Support NeoGAF

[01011001]

I am not a developer but just looking at games being made today and games being made 20 years ago, the differences are huge in regards to world size and level of detail, systems in place, etc.

Look at GTA3, Vice City, and San Andreas, and compare them to GTAV. Everything about GTAV is bigger and more detailed and complex, not just 2x so or even 3x so, but orders of magnitudes more.

there's a difference in how games are made today that makes many things way easier tho.

back then almost every studio used their own engine, which they had to develop and then train developers they hired to use.
Nintendo for example literally developed a new engine for every new game they made for quite some time...

now most big games use either openly available engines like Unreal or Unity, or the publishers have one engine most of their studios use.


the big issue with budget these days is the Advertisement budget. for some games the budget for promoting the game is as big as the whole development budget of the title. and that's fucking stupid to say the least in a world where a game with zero budget can become a million seller, big publishers still think that extremely massive ad campaigns are the way to go.


to me it seems like the long dev cycles and gigantic budgets are as much of a management issue as it is an issue of games becoming complex.
posterchild of that phenomenon is Halo Infinite of course.
larger budget and longer dev time than any Halo game before it, yet it failed to deliver even half of what some of its predecessors did.

 

[DerivedDataCache]

One month of work to model a single building? Damn.

Yes it takes a while. Hiring a lot of artist to make unique art adds up. Thats why all the big studios have been outsourcing for a while.
https://theoutline.com/post/3087/outsourcing-blockbuster-video-games-made-in-china-horizon-zero-dawn
For example in the article it explains how the Robo T-Rex in Horizon was made by a Chinese studio 5 times cheaper.

Quote:
New hires at the Virtuos’ Shanghai studio make around $11,000 a year, or around 6,000 yuan a month. This is what one of the studio’s expat managers told me he pays in rent every month. Entry-level pay at Virtuos is slightly higher than the national average monthly salary of 5,169 yuan, according to the National Bureau of Statistics of China, but just a bit lower than the average salary in Shanghai, which is 6,504 yuan, according to the Shanghai Resources and Social Security Bureau. The average salary for an entry-level artist in the games industry in the U.S. is $50,643 according to an industry survey from trade site Gamasutra, down from $55,682 in 2012.

But because each robot had so many components, artists were only assigned specific parts which would later be assembled into one whole. This required extra attention from team leads and the project art director to ensure the minute measurements and adjustments an artist made on one part wouldn’t throw off the whole. The game’s biggest robot, the Thunderjaw, took a group of six artists almost four months to finish, more than 600 days of labor in all.


And if a indie/solo dev want to build something similar like the division it costs around 400 just for the buildings.
https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/american-city-packs-bundle

Now imagine having to pay for characters, guns, particles, sound etc. And you can easily get in the 10,000+ range. Compared to gaming, gamedev is an expensive hobby.

 

[Wildebeest]

The question is not really a technical problem about the tools needed to accelerate development. It is a business strategy problem. The big publishers decided that the way to make their products stand out and make their studios more reliable hit making machines was to balloon the budget of games. To just blow consumers away with the amount spent on story presentation, voice actors, art assets, and so on. You can see why they did that when quite a lot of people will look around at the massive amount of new games without that spend and say they are just trash, empty, boring and that nothing stands out about them. If there were tools to make development go at twice the speed they would just have to slow down development more than twice as much, so people will be impressed, and their game will stand out from the crowd.

 

[NeonDelta]

motion capture: studio + actors
orchestrated music: composer + orchestra
cgi cinematic: studio
voice dub: actors
...

plus studio/warehouse hire, programmers, developers,artists, storyboard, etc.. etc.. and so on.

compare this to 30 years ago

artist
programmer
midi keyboard
someones bedroom/garage/basement

 

[RoadHazard]

Higher quality assets and more detailed environments take longer to make.

 

[Akt]

Everyone is trying to become another Hideo Kojima.

 

[Oof85]

Too much emphasis on realism.
The more realistic something is, the more specific it has to be, and the more detail you have to add to make it realistic.

And so, you have thousands of recorded voices, motion capture for realistic animations, photorealistic rendering, realistic physics, high polygon models, very complex shaders and materials, and so on.
It's a losing battle, but marketing likes it.

Basically everything I feel as well.

The chase for lifelike realism completely befuddles me. Stylized looks >>> uncanny valley nightmarish spiral.

Because it'll never catch up. You can't escape the dollish "something isn't right" feeling.

Which makes Sony's habit of taking well-known memes and recreating them via inhouse properties kinda silly but harmless, for me.

 

[cormack12]

Because the games we mean when we talk about this are too big.

Also most of the stories I've read about long development cycles have featured 'creative' changes from narrative perspectives or struggles to get something working that was pitched on an assumption.

Meaning wasted time and trying to find a creative way to get it working only to eventually throw it out and try something else.

I do think games need to be recognised as little triumphs though. They cross so many areas of skills, expertise and actual technical talent and I have nothing but respect for teams that deliver a complete game.

 

[OZ9000]

Just looking at Sony studios. They used to make 8-10 hour games in the PS3 era. Now they make 30-40 hour campaigns with another 20-30 hours of side content. I have no idea why TLOU2, GOW and Ghost had to have 30 hour campaigns. It makes no sense. It destroys the pacing. TLOU and Uncharted 4 already felt long at 15 hours. Even RPGs back then were around 20 hours with maybe 10 hours of side content. Now RDR2 which isnt even an RPG had a 50 hour story campaign. I love that game but they couldve easily shaved off 20 hours from that campaign.

And thats pretty much it. When the campaign alone takes 3x as long, the game development will take 3x longer. Couple that with everything becoming open world and GaaS and there is just more to make than they were back then.

It also doesnt help that they are still working on last gen games with shitty dated last gen engines. Remember, the Schreier articles on how it took Bungie 8 hours just to change one loot box location in Patrol? Well, most game studios nowadays are still designing their games using last gen engines instead of new technologies like Lumens and Nanite which drastically speed up the development process. Instead they literally have to downgrade the assets several times to ensure they have several different LOD versions of every single asset and manually light each scene instead of letting the new realtime GI solutions automatically light the scene for them.

It's ironic that greedy publishers chasing more dollars by making games cross gen have ended up making their game development times longer, and thus more costly. Personally, I love me some comeuppance.

Devs need to stop making long ass games.

No one has the time to play shitty fucking 30-40 hour campaigns.

 

[Captain Toad]

Seems fairly obvious. These games now have paid actors and more scenes and spoken dialog than big-budget movies.

And that's just on top of all the stuff that goes into actual normal videogame production that now have graphics that sonetimes rival Pixar-quality movies, but must be fully playable.

 

[It's all in the wrist]

Playing through Cyberpunk, I get it. Games are so massive and complex these days.

There are more people making games, though, so it's all good. Take your time.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

Because the games we mean when we talk about this are too big.

For all the games with big plot and dialogue, I truly wonder how many gamers actually read or listen to this shit in full, partially, or pressing x button asap to skip it.

Aside from Mass Effect which you got to spend a bit of time going through dialogue to choose the one you want, I'm a press x button gamer.

All that money spent on that to me is literally ignored.

ES games have tons of books to grab off a shelf with maybe 5 pages of text. Never read one. I doubt anyone out there has bothered reading any of them/most of them either.

 

[Sophist]

Everyone is trying to become another Hideo Kojima.

Shinji Mikami was kojima before kojima; Resident evil already had hollywood cutscenes, voice acting, drama. If Mikami had the budget, he would probably have hired celebs too. Sadly, Mikami and his Resident Evil are usually forgotten when it come to narative video games legacy.

 

[Wildebeest]

Shinji Mikami was kojima before kojima; Resident evil already had hollywood cutscenes, voice acting, drama. If Mikami had the budget, he would probably have hired celebs too. Sadly, Mikami and his Resident Evil are usually forgotten when it come to narative video games legacy.

Chris Roberts actually did have well known movie actors in his Wing Commander games.

 

[Xeaker]

Games take way longer to develop and are worse than games from the golden age

 

[pramod]

Yeah, I don't get it either. Maybe I've been playing the "wrong" games, but games these days don't feel that they have 3x more content or gameplay, but they seem to take 3x more time or effort to make, which makes no sense. Especially with the wealth of 3D engines and tools you can just buy off the shelf these days.

 

[hemo memo]

Because publishers keep making games bigger and bigger to justify the price. People barely finish games according to data that publishers fully aware of, yet they keep making games bigger and complain about development cost. It is bizarre.

 

[rofif]

I am not a developer but just looking at games being made today and games being made 20 years ago, the differences are huge in regards to world size and level of detail, systems in place, etc.

Look at GTA3, Vice City, and San Andreas, and compare them to GTAV. Everything about GTAV is bigger and more detailed and complex, not just 2x so or even 3x so, but orders of magnitudes more.

That’s false view tho.
Games like vice city were amazing looking and huge upon release.
And now we’re got much better tools

 

[ReBurn]

Side topic: Vegas Stakes wasnt a bad casino game. Like many back in the day, a bad slow UI is the worst thing for a casino game. And it kind of had that. But for what it was it was decent. The intro to the game is pure degeneracy. A bunch of people speeding off to get to a casino ASAP.

It also let you save your game in a way that allowed you to reload after every loss to get your money back. It was a good casino game but there was no real risk.

 

[nush]

Some of those old games with dialogue, I dont even think they hired actors. It could be so bad, it seemed like the programmers doubled doing voice work.

It was just like that, you'll find me in a game as a soldier in Vietnam for that reason.

 

[JayK47]

It is ridiculous. Take Bethesda. They released Fallout 4 back in 2015. To think in a few years it will regularly take 5 to 10 years to make a game, in some cases skipping entire console generations. Developers either need to scale up their resources or scale back the game scope or both. They should aim for 2 years to make a game. It takes 2 damn years to make DLC these days (I'm looking at you Cyberpunk).

 

[Yoboman]

Just need to look at them

You've got more polygons and textures on characters than entire levels of PS2 games

 

[Amiga]

There's a number of reasons that could be pointed out, however when you consider stuff like Death Stranding apparently got made in 3 years with a team of 80 devs, i start to think the reason behind a lot of these high development times is down to poor direction and mismanagement.

direction and management are a talent in themselves. Kojimas are a rare breed. not every studio can have a high quality turnout at a stable rate like Insomniac. And it's not something you can simply figure out, MS executives tried but only ended up running their studios. Turn10 were an exception because MS executives left them alone.

 

[JimRyanGOAT]

Inflation
Supply & Demand
Growing Expectations

 

[adamsapple]

Games take way longer to develop and are worse than games from the golden age

No, we just look at the older games with rose tinted glasses as they were pivotal parts of our 'growing' years where every new thing is a new wonder and amazing.

 

[Guilty_AI]

direction and management are a talent in themselves. Kojimas are a rare breed. not every studio can have a high quality turnout at a stable rate like Insomniac. And it's not something you can simply figure out, MS executives tried but only ended up running their studios. Turn10 were an exception because MS executives left them alone.

I think its more due to he fact many publishers and developers haven't figured out how to create a proper pipeline for game development yet. Each game can vastly differ from one another and as such may require different approaches to development. Games like Forza or Assassins Creed follow set formulas whose teams have been working on for a decade, and as such can be more consistent on their output.
In Kojima's case i think its also important to point out his team is very talented, Kojima himself can create and deliver a proper vision with some consistency and his team is capable of understanding and following on that vision.

 

[0neAnd0nly]

Blame:

A) GTA

B) The shift in work life, where employees in gaming complain about OT and run to media outlets to tattle during crunches

For real though, I have said this in here before - but when I was in the industry, I had a business trip / conference where we had to sit in classes and study what was happening in gaming (for marketing) and other yada yada stuff for 3 days. This was literally right around PS4/ XBO launch.

One of the days, there was a graph charting the average development cost from ps2/XB -> ps3/ 360 days. Which happened to show GTA4 development cost.

It was ~100 million. Most other games at the time were only average around 10-15 million IIRC. Staggeringly big difference.

That next hour was discussing how much modern GTA games were changing the development of other games moving forward.

And here we are.

 

[Danjin44]

Blame:

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/graphical-fidelity-i-expect-this-gen.1623441/

I mean most you guys might have not notice but graphic whoring has become norm here, some people in GAF just downright dismiss a game if the graphics dont meet their standard.

This especially become true for western devs, they are expected to deliver high tech realistic graphics in most of their games, this is also why majority of Japanese devs stop trying compete in graphics maybe other than Square and Capcom.

You guys want most advance graphics? Then takes time to make and cost lot man power and money.....that just reality of AAA development.

 

[Jinzo Prime]

This required extra attention from team leads and the project art director to ensure the minute measurements and adjustments an artist made on one part wouldn’t throw off the whole. The game’s biggest robot, the Thunderjaw, took a group of six artists almost four months to finish, more than 600 days of labor in all.

All that work for a single robot dinosaur? All that effort could have been spent elsewhere.

 

[Deerock71]

This is what's called AAA Craps. Either you roll a 7 or 11 and live to make another, or it's snakeyes and mobile games for you.

 

[93xfan]

Multiple diversity officers have to review each asset. Plus extra paid days off each month to dye your hair a different color.

 

[bentanchorbolt]

That’s false view tho.
Games like vice city were amazing looking and huge upon release.
And now we’re got much better tools

Oh right I guess I was wrong. Thanks for pointing that out.

 

[AJUMP23]

In simplest terms people and development of fidelity of the assets.

 

[fran.fernandez]

There’s tons of details now, tech change so fast that game need to be refactored a lot to keep trends …

And most important, the quit ratio is really high, people get bored after some years with no output, getting new talent and prepare the tools take year minimum

 

[lh032]

inflation.

I mean price increased for almost every single thing, including wages.
And games were getting complex to make, despite "UE5 is easier to use" argument.

 

[rofif]

Oh right I guess I was wrong. Thanks for pointing that out.

No no. Not like that.
It’s just much more complicated. Games always looked high end at the time so it’s relative

 

[{insert code here}]

AI will eventually fix this. Imagine being able to type in a few keywords and the AI returning asset(s) that you can immediately implement and test. This also has the added bonus of drastically reduced budgets.

 

[Clear]

The more complex any given element is, then the more complex fitting it into the overall jigsaw puzzle becomes. Meshing stuff together becomes almost exponentially more difficult and time consuming.

Its pretty much that simple.

 

[Stealth_Cobra]

Yeah, the tech is simply way more complex that before. I mean if you go back to let's say the PSX era, you had super low resolution textures, bad frame rates, terrible animation, primitive character models... Now we have people who spend years doing tech so that the reflection on the eyelids of characters look natural in every situations, systems so that every field of grass in a region reacts to wind dynamically, dynamic weather, complex day and night cycles, extremely complex shadows / lighting, ray tracing and reflections , the list goes on and one and on... And that's not even talking about actually finding a gameplay formula that works, ensuring the content is fun and stable and releasing all of this in a package that is desirable for the consumers.

At the end of the day, it's simply way more work to recreate worlds that look photo-realistic than what was before in previous gens, and sadly alot of the tech developped for other projects often can't be used directly on other projects, since the needs of each production are usually very different. At the end of the day, devs are often stuck starting from scratch rebuilding tech for stuff that used to work in the past, but simply woudn't cut it in this day and age of high fidellity, high fps gaming.

 

[AeonGaidenRaiden]

Quake 1 was made by like 7 guys. Uncharted 4 had over 200 people working on it actively. So imagine thats 200 salaries, rent space for such a crowd plus whatever legal benefits. Back in the 90s games were made by friends, that would order pizza every single day and sleep under their desk. The scope of the game is always pushed further. Just when you think, ok we wont ever have loading screens....sure we really made them minimal but they arent non existant because the open world is 3 times the size of the one than on PS3. Then the resolution and fps but including massive details at the same time, the games are just becoming bigger and bigger.

 

[rofif]

Yeah, the tech is simply way more complex that before. I mean if you go back to let's say the PSX era, you had super low resolution textures, bad frame rates, terrible animation, primitive character models... Now we have people who spend years doing tech so that the reflection on the eyelids of characters look natural in every situations, systems so that every field of grass in a region reacts to wind dynamically, dynamic weather, complex day and night cycles, extremely complex shadows / lighting, ray tracing and reflections , the list goes on and one and on... And that's not even talking about actually finding a gameplay formula that works, ensuring the content is fun and stable and releasing all of this in a package that is desirable for the consumers.

At the end of the day, it's simply way more work to recreate worlds that look photo-realistic than what was before in previous gens, and sadly alot of the tech developped for other projects often can't be used directly on other projects, since the needs of each production are usually very different. At the end of the day, devs are often stuck starting from scratch rebuilding tech for stuff that used to work in the past, but simply woudn't cut it in this day and age of high fidellity, high fps gaming.

But that tech was state of the art back then too.
It was equally impressive to games today.
And the tools are better now

 

[Shubh_C63]

Easy Answer ?
Because Developer and Publisher are not satisfied with 80% Profit, they want 800% Profit. So either go AAA or go home.
And even in the ever growing market, for games to standout needs to be more complex, more beautiful looking so they can beat the competition. Its a rat race. The technical aspects is self imposed as we are all spoiled now.

MS playing this well with ok-ish budget AA games.

 

[qwertz12345]

Yes it takes a while. Hiring a lot of artist to make unique art adds up. Thats why all the big studios have been outsourcing for a while.
https://theoutline.com/post/3087/outsourcing-blockbuster-video-games-made-in-china-horizon-zero-dawn
For example in the article it explains how the Robo T-Rex in Horizon was made by a Chinese studio 5 times cheaper.

Quote:
New hires at the Virtuos’ Shanghai studio make around $11,000 a year, or around 6,000 yuan a month. This is what one of the studio’s expat managers told me he pays in rent every month. Entry-level pay at Virtuos is slightly higher than the national average monthly salary of 5,169 yuan, according to the National Bureau of Statistics of China, but just a bit lower than the average salary in Shanghai, which is 6,504 yuan, according to the Shanghai Resources and Social Security Bureau. The average salary for an entry-level artist in the games industry in the U.S. is $50,643 according to an industry survey from trade site Gamasutra, down from $55,682 in 2012.

But because each robot had so many components, artists were only assigned specific parts which would later be assembled into one whole. This required extra attention from team leads and the project art director to ensure the minute measurements and adjustments an artist made on one part wouldn’t throw off the whole. The game’s biggest robot, the Thunderjaw, took a group of six artists almost four months to finish, more than 600 days of labor in all.


And if a indie/solo dev want to build something similar like the division it costs around 400 just for the buildings.
https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/american-city-packs-bundle

Now imagine having to pay for characters, guns, particles, sound etc. And you can easily get in the 10,000+ range. Compared to gaming, gamedev is an expensive hobby.

Does that mean you can essentially build your own "indie" studio in places like China?

You could basically just hire 1 person, and tell that developer to make their own unique game within a year.

Hire a few developers, and you've basically established yourself as a developer / publisher that's similar to Devolver Digital.

 

[ZywyPL]

Partially because in the industry (and not just gaming, many others as well) there's this stupid belief that more/bigger=better. And to go more and bigger you need more human power and working hours, and those cost.

The holy business triangle applies to every single industy, you can pick between cheap/fast/good, but pick only two while sacrificing the remaining one.

I'm curious how a development of a modern PS360-like game that's linear and contained within 8-12h would look like, how long and how much would it take?

 

[Craig of War]

It the graphics whore effect

"Noun. graphics whore (plural graphics whores) (video games, derogatory, vulgar) A fan of computer graphics who favours good graphics over gameplay."

 

[MatrixReloaded101]

There's a number of reasons that could be pointed out, however when you consider stuff like Death Stranding apparently got made in 3 years with a team of 80 devs, i start to think the reason behind a lot of these high development times is down to poor direction and mismanagement.

This^ is the main reason, go look up why cyberpunk 2077 turned out the way it did. It was mainly really bad project management.

If you look at the graphics for most games today they actually have not evolved that much. Most games being released at the moment are cross gen so the idea that graphics is the reason just isn’t true.

I think bad project planning and management is what leads to longer development times and bigger budgets. Also you have to keep in mind games produce more profit now than they did in the past so the budget thing gets balanced out when you factor that.

I also think marketing cost has to be a factor here because there is more competition now in the gaming space than before, that was also why Cyberpunk 2077 sold so well despite the issues with the games. It had a huge marketing budget. The more competition, the bigger the marketing budget has to be to compete.

 

[TrebleShot]

I just Finished Cyberpunk 2077 and basically main lined the whole thing.
This was on PS5 and post patch, my one throught coming away from it was why did they bother with the whole GTA clone type thing.

The city is nice to look at and the story is half decent but it is very very janky, the Visual quality is poor as is the gameplay, christ the gameplay is painful i think i tried 4 or 5 controller settings before settling on one pretty close To the end of the game.

They could have easily made game world HUBs with a more focused approach to the levelling system the upgrades and the story, sort of like Deus Ex - which was a much better overall experience.

When you consider how long it took to make it and how much they likely spent on it, im not Surprised they have switched the the UE5, whateever engine they used is very dated and I imagine a nightmare to wrestle with.

 

[Krathoon]

One way around this is to make a retro game. Shovel Knight makes this whole elaborate game by combining game mechanics from many NES games. ...and they were a Kickstarted project.

 

[Kokoloko85]

More textures, more polygons, more detail, more animations, facial animations, attention to detail, more music, more ai etc etc. its gonna get more and more expensive.
Why studies who make pokemon and fifa are peices of shit because they charge 50-70 dollars/pounds for releasing the same shit over and over again tech wise

 

[The Eradicator]

When they're adding totally useless things to the games, like dynamic horse testicles in RDR2, then they add a bunch of extra, useless development time. They think we want this stuff more than good control mechanics, apparently.