First of all, I have zero knowledge of game development.
Before, a game would take about 2-3 years to finish and when it released , the whole game was there.
These days it takes about 4,5, or even 6 years to develop and when it comes out, half the content is missing and they just release more content over the years.
Also, aren’t game engines like Unreal supposed to make development easier and cheaper?
Universal engines like Unreal and Unity greatly improve workflow, meaning its easier to create stuff, which is apparent in the onslaught of indie games using both of these engines.
At the same time, authoring assets and their complexity has increased as years go by. Where artists in the PS360 era had access to fancy shader effects, things like lighting were baked and/or approximated. In other words: The asset pipeline was based on approximations based on the artist.
In the PBR (Physically Based Rendering) era, the pipeline changed: Gone was the hand-tuned, artist-approximated approach in favor of a workflow based on real life properties of materials, like diffuse, albedo, roughness, and so on. Because there was a
reference spec, assets could be produced that matched this spec, using photogrammetry (Photographing assets and through the PBR workflow creating almost a 1 to 1 true to life asset)
However, asset size increased linearly aswell, leading to algorithmic and procedural solutions to be developed. Procedural generation
defines a text stating how an orange looks like, and then
generates it based on the definition. This is in contrast to non-procedural solutions: An asset of an orange is a model shaped like an orange.
As a model is exponentially larger in asset size than a text definition defining how an orange looks like, procedural generation is great for keeping sizes small. No Man's Sky uses this to extensive degree to generate a huge world based on definitions and parameters.
How much does covid have to do with this?
Not much in terms of workflow. As assets get larger and need more data, so does it cost more rendering power to achieve it.
What COVID did was forcing developers to continue development at home, using office PC's instead of workstations. Alongside the reduced computing power, tools at work aren't always available at home.
Then there is the human deficit: Artists have families, families who will distract you when working from home. All that combined leads to a reduction in effectivity and thus a prolonged development cycle.
Outliers also exists, such as GSC Game World and (Previously) 4A Games. They developed their games in a time of unrest/war. 4A has had a
story around this from 2013. Its a fascinating insight in a developer who shows the hard passion for developing games in the face of upcoming disturbance.
I feel like this is happening to AAA a lot more and not every game is like this.